Early Warning (Book 1): Martial Law

by McLean, Angus

  ‘Right,’ I said, turning to face them both. ‘I have a job for you two today.’

  ‘Am I going to school, Dad?’ Archie asked. He had a smear of jam on his cheek and I wiped it away.

  ‘No buddy, not today. Probably not for a few days.’

  ‘Why not? We’ve got Jump Jam today.’

  ‘I know bud, but school’s closed for a few days. The earthquakes down in Wellington have caused quite a few problems, and the Government – the people that run the country – are trying to work out how to fix things so that we can all go on with our normal lives, okay?’

  ‘So I’m not going to school then, like in the school holidays?’

  ‘That’s right.’ I gave him a reassuring grin, watching as he processed this change of events in his head. ‘So that means you get to stay home and do fun stuff instead.’

  ‘And look after Grandma.’

  I nodded and grinned. ‘And look after Grandma. So today you can help Grandma collect the eggs and check on the chooks, and Grandma will probably want to do some colouring in…’

  ‘I hate colouring in, it’s boring.’ He pulled a face. ‘Why can’t we build something instead?’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said. It was like he had read my mind. ‘Why don’t you work on your fort?’

  His face lit up and he clapped his hands with delight. Grandma didn’t look so enthused.

  ‘Great idea,’ I said. ‘While you do that I’ll pop into town and get a few bits and pieces to help, then I’ll come home and we’ll do some more building stuff okay?’

  ‘I’ll go have my wash then,’ Archie cried, wriggling off the bar stool and heading for the bathroom. ‘Come on Grandma, you better get ready too.’ He paused at the door and turned back to her. ‘But I don’t mind if you finish your coffee first,’ he said sincerely. ‘I’ll just wait for you.’

  I gave him a wink, feeling the love and pride welling up inside me. While he took off to get ready, I turned to my mother.

  ‘I need your help today,’ I said.

  She swallowed her mouthful and put the cup down, knowing there was more to it. ‘I don’t know how good I’ll be at building a fort,’ she said.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, it’s about keeping him busy so he’s not worrying about Gem. And he knows what he’s doing with it, he just needs a hand. The main thing is that I need you two to stay together and keep your eyes open, okay?’

  She frowned at me and bristled. ‘Of course, I have looked after children before, Mark.’

  ‘I know, but this is different and you need to be vigilant. Come with me.’

  I led her to the spare room. The curtains were open and her bedcovers were thrown back. I opened the gun safe and showed her the shotgun and rifle in there.

  ‘Last night I caught two young shitheads trying to break in.’

  She looked shocked but said nothing, not even scolding me for my language.

  ‘I ran them off and left them in no doubt what would happen if they came back. But even though I had a gun on them, one of them would still have had a go if he had half a chance.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Grandma took a deep breath. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘No. I’ll carry on being on guard when I’m home, but I want you to make sure that you’re always handy to a gun. Remember firing the shotgun last year?’

  She gave a nervous laugh. ‘I remember the bruise on my shoulder. I didn’t like that thing.’

  ‘Then use the twenty-two. It barely kicks, it’s quieter, and it’s got fifteen rounds in the magazine. Here.’

  I took it out and gave her a two-minute refresher on handling it, working the bolt and using the safety. I didn’t need her to be a marksman; I just needed her to be able to point it at a bad guy and make it go bang.

  I could tell she wasn’t comfortable but that was too bad. I wasn’t comfortable leaving them home alone either, but I couldn’t see another way just now.

  Archie appeared just as I was putting the Ruger back in the safe. He had his PJ pants pulled over his head like a hat and was cracking himself up.

  ‘Look at me, Dad.’

  I laughed with him and even Grandma cheered up at the sound of his laughter.

  ‘I can smell my fart,’ he giggled. ‘And now my head smells like a butt.’

  Normally I would have told him off for talking like that in front of his grandmother, but his humour was contagious and it felt good to forget reality for a moment and get carried away by a happy child. I steered him towards his bedroom instead and told him to get dressed double-quick.

  I turned back to my mother. The tension in her face had eased slightly after Archie’s joking about.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘He’ll look after you.’

  She nodded and gave a wistful smile. ‘He’s quite a character.’

  ‘He is that.’

  ‘Have you heard from the McMasters’?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘No, I’ve checked but messages don’t seem to be coming through. I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe there’s roadblocks or something.’ The or something could be a whole raft of things that didn’t bear thinking about; looters, a road crash, a breakdown, a medical emergency, who knew? ‘We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess.’

  I started to turn away. She never asked about Gemma’s parents in a positive way, so it was yet another conversation to cut short.

  ‘I wish your father was here.’

  I stopped in my tracks, unsure if I’d heard right.

  My father had walked out years ago, taken up with a younger woman with even younger kids, and it tore the family apart. Understandably there had been a lot of bitterness and resentment but my mother was a master game-player and had always tried to keep her ex-husband within reach. Maintaining a connection with him pulled the other bird’s strings too, and Mum had obviously decided that the best way of getting some payback was to mindfuck them both when she could.

  I’d never heard her say she missed him though, until now. Maybe it had been about more than just playing with them.

  I turned to her, unsure of how to respond. My mother was a tough woman, but for the first time in my memory she looked vulnerable and it threw me. She saw my hesitation and the vulnerability evaporated as fast as it had appeared.

  ‘You better get going if you want to go,’ she said abruptly, putting a hand on the door. ‘I’ll get myself dressed so the little man’s not waiting.’

  That was my cue and I took it, closing the door between us again.

  Twenty-Nine

  Ellerslie was an upper-middle-class city suburb, sandwiched between the wealth of Remuera and the middle/working-class Mount Wellington.

  Gemma had flatted there at one point years ago so had some idea of the layout, and she used this to put distance between themselves and the thugs in the V8. Her head was pounding and her legs felt like jelly but she pushed herself on until she felt like throwing up.

  By the time she pulled up short in a side street she could no longer hear the roar of the V8 behind them and she guessed they must have covered at least a couple of kilometres. The Ellerslie Racing Club was behind them and over to their left somewhere and they were in a quiet residential street.

  She leaned forward with her hands on her knees, her breath tearing at her throat as she fought for oxygen. Sweat soaked her top and ran freely down her face and neck. She spat and sucked down another breath, resisting the urge to throw up. The rock wall at her back was lumpy and covered in ivy. Glancing sideways, she saw Alex finally catch up.

  He collapsed on the footpath beside her, sprawling down in a sweaty heap before he started to wretch. He rolled onto his hands and knees and vomited on the path, his body convulsing as he heaved his guts out.

  Gemma left him to it and focussed on getting herself under control, finally managing to stand up and draw a full breath. She hadn’t realised how unfit she’d become. It hadn’t been a long distance they’d covered, but the pressure of the situation added a level of stress she’d
never experienced before.

  The terror she had felt while the guys in the Holden V8 had screamed around the area, hunting them down, had been unreal. There had been nothing for it but to just run like hell and get out of there. She’d lost count of how many fences she’d climbed, how many properties she’d run through. At one stage a big Alsatian had come racing after them but her fear gave her wings that left the dog for dust.

  She shrugged off her daypack and got some water down her, letting some run down her throat and chest. She put the empty bottle back into the pack and looked down, realising she had carried the red first aid kit the whole way. For some reason she hadn’t even considered ditching the extra weight.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Alex moaned. He rolled into a sitting position and leaned back against the rock wall, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Oh my God…’

  ‘You should drink some water,’ Gemma said. She watched him struggle to his feet and straighten up. His sweaty face was a picture of pain, and she guessed he was as unfit as she was. Probably worse.

  Right now it seemed to be all that he could do to remain upright, without the added pressure of rehydrating.

  ‘Have they gone?’ he wheezed.

  ‘I think so.’ Gemma looked over her shoulder. ‘For now, anyway.’ She paused, collecting her thoughts. ‘I think I shot one of them.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Alex fumbled with the zip on his daypack. ‘I think you did.’ He stopped what he was doing and looked up at her, as if the realisation had just hit him. ‘You shot that guy.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Gemma nodded, hearing his voice but not seeing him. ‘I think I did.’ She felt a flutter in her stomach and had the horrible sensation that she was about to throw up. People always did that in the movies, normal people anyway, when they had to kill someone. In a moment the feeling was gone, replaced by a hollow feeling. ‘I had to. He was going to shoot me.’ She frowned. ‘They all were, they were going to kill us. They killed those cops.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Alex was watching her, waiting to see how she was going to react as she processed the facts. ‘I think they would’ve.’

  Gemma stood for a moment, the thoughts tumbling over and over in her head. I just shot a guy. He was going to kill us.

  This was Mark’s world, not hers. Things like this didn’t happen to normal people. She was used to working in an office with normal people, talking to normal people about normal things, doing the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and looking after their house and their son.

  Mark’s world had some of that too, but it also had a large volume of bad people doing bad things, extreme violence and sadism, the kind of horrible stuff that gave good people nightmares. She wondered how he would have dealt with the guys at the car. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t have walked away from it.

  But, right now, that didn’t matter. Right now, she was alive because she had reacted to a situation that was forced upon her, and she had to be happy with that. She thanked her lucky stars that she had reacted how she did. Fortunately she had at least a basic level of experience with firearms, and the mindset to go with it. She knew it wasn’t about being the best with a gun or the hardest or toughest fighter. It was about taking decisive action and not giving up.

  With that in mind, she crouched over her daypack and took out the Glock. She found the magazine release button on the left of the grip and dropped out the empty mag. She pulled back on the slide at the top and let it run forward. The other two mags she had grabbed from the gun safe appeared to be full. She loaded one into the butt of the pistol, hearing it click into place and remembering to slap the baseplate to make sure it was seated; Mark always did that with his .22 rifle.

  She pulled the slide back and let it go forward again, knowing this would put a bullet in the chamber so the gun was good to go. She took a few moments checking for a safety catch before remembering Mark had said the Glock didn’t have one. ‘Your trigger finger is your safety,’ he’d told her once.

  Gemma put the empty magazine into her daypack, removed the spare from its pouch and slipped it into her pocket, and zipped up the bag again. She stood and carefully secured the pistol in the front of her waistband, where she could easily grab it. She realised that Alex was watching her.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said, ‘it’s just…you look kind of…comfortable with that. Like you know what you’re doing.’

  Gemma felt her eyebrows raise at his description. ‘I don’t know if comfortable is the right word,’ she said. ‘And I never thought I’d be running around with a gun, that’s for sure. But it’s a better alternative than being raped or shot.’

  He gave her a doubtful look. ‘I don’t know about getting raped…’ he said.

  ‘Well you probably don’t need to, do you?’ she retorted, with more heat than she’d intended. ‘But I don’t think those guys were out collecting for the Red Cross, were they?’

  ‘It’s a bit of a stretch,’ he persisted, forcing himself to his feet.

  ‘Think what you like, Alex,’ Gemma told him bluntly. ‘But I’m not going to let some arsehole like that get their hands on me. If Mark had been there he would have killed every single one of them and not even batted an eye.’

  Alex studied her dubiously. She could almost see the cogs churning in his head. What the hell have I got myself into here? She’s crazy.

  ‘He sounds like a hard man,’ he said.

  Gemma pondered that for a second before giving her head a short shake. ‘Tough,’ she said, ‘but not hard.’

  ‘Same thing isn’t it?’

  ‘Hard means you have no feelings. Tough means you’re strong but still have feelings.’ She hitched the daypack on her shoulders. ‘Mark has feelings. You just don’t want to cross him, that’s all.’

  Alex slung his own bag onto his back, then picked up the red first aid pack. ‘I guess I better carry this since you’ve got the gun,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get shot for arguing with you, Gemma.’

  She frowned and was about to snap at him when she caught the teasing look on his face. ‘Ha ha, very funny. Just don’t drop it because you’re so tired,’ she said.

  She looked around, getting her bearings. There was no traffic on the road and no birdsong in the trees. She could hear vehicles further away, the rumble of a truck, the roar of a chainsaw – who the hell was chain sawing today? she wondered – and a helicopter somewhere in the distance. Nobody had come out of their house since they’d been there, but she guessed people were probably there, hidden away inside.

  ‘We need to keep heading south,’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘It’d be great if we could get our hands on a car. Or even bikes. If we keep on walking then we might come across something that’ll speed us up.’

  ‘How long do you think it’ll take us to get to Manukau?’ Alex asked.

  Gemma shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Hopefully we should get there today, but it depends what we come across I guess. The sooner we get going, the better.’

  Thirty

  The biggest bonus of travelling in a motorhome was being fully self-contained.

  The McMasters had spent a comfortable night in a double bed, warm and secure, disturbed only by the movements and noise of fellow stranded travellers. They woke early to the sounds of arguing nearby and listened to a couple venting their frustrations at each other. Apparently he was a moron for not gassing the car up before they left and she was a selfish bitch for hogging the only blanket all night.

  Sandy prepared a breakfast of cereal and canned fruit with milk from the chilly bin, and boiled the jug on the gas stove for a strong cup of tea. Rob dressed himself and went outside, surveying their surroundings again. Nothing appeared to have changed overnight aside from the couple glaring at each other beside the lowered and tinted Toyota rocket in the next lane.

  They were in their mid-twenties – millennials, he thought they were called these days – and looked dishevelled and grumpy. He had pants down around his arse and a skater hoody. She wor
e tight jeans and her hair was bleached within an inch of its life.

  Rob gave them a nod and the girl nodded back. The guy looked sullen and ignored him.

  ‘Rough night?’ Rob said.

  The girl nodded again and he could see she was on the verge of tears. The guy scowled to show how fierce he was.

  ‘Have you got any food?’ Rob said.

  They gave each other daggers and the girl wiped her nose. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I s’pose you’ve got a kitchen in there,’ the guy sneered, ‘in your fancy fuckin’ house bus.’

  Rob looked at him coolly, letting his gaze settle on the guy’s face until the younger man looked away and scowled some more.

  ‘We do have a kitchen,’ he said, ‘and there’s no call for that kind of attitude. It’s been a crappy night for you by the looks of it, and I was going to offer you a cup of tea. But if you don’t want it…’

  ‘Yes please,’ the girl said quickly, giving her boyfriend another look. ‘We’d love one.’

  The guy started to sneer again but the girl cut him off. ‘Don’t be a dick, Josh,’ she said. ‘He’s being nice.’ She turned back to Rob. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  Rob nodded. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Two please.’

  He returned shortly with two steaming paper cups and handed them over. The girl took hers gratefully and the guy even muttered a surly thank you. Rob stepped back so as not to crowd them, noticing that other people were milling around by their vehicles as well, idling chatting or just standing.

  Waiting. Everybody waiting for help that wasn’t going to come.

  The smell of petrol was still strong in the air and he wondered how long it would take for someone to light up a smoke. Hopefully back here it wouldn’t pose a risk but closer to the crash scene it would be catastrophic. Igniting the fumes would cause a chain reaction of fires and explosions down the highway of packed cars and dozens of people would be killed and injured.