by Ward III, C.
Anxiety raced through him. The thick summer humidity had nothing to do with the sweat streams running down his face. The thought of a Gray pouncing on him in the dark was paralyzing. He spun around at the sound of gravel crunching behind him. Something hard struck his outstretched arm, causing him to drop his pistol, and a bag went over his head just as quickly. His legs were kicked out from under him, and then a knockout blow caused him to lose consciousness.
Ed awoke with a splitting headache and a killer kink in his neck. His mind was swimming in fog, and he was having a difficult time recalling what had happened. It was dark. His eyes were dry. There was a deep smell of dampness and dirt. Something was making his face itch. It was when he reached up to feel what was over his head that he noticed his arms were restrained behind him by cold metallic bracelets.
“Why were you breaking into my house?” a nearby low voice asked, sounding slightly bored and annoyed.
“We’re hunters! We’re looking for—”
Before Ed could finish his sentence, the chair he was sitting in was kicked over, slamming him backward onto a cold, hard floor. The air flew out of his lungs, his back popped, and his head bounced off the hard floor. He was opening his mouth to curse when the burlap bag that had been over his head became heavy with water, dripping into his eyes and filling his mouth with a foul taste.
He didn’t understand what was happening, but the water kept coming. He couldn’t cough or spit it out. He was beginning to drown. Panic set it. He thrashed about, trying to escape the water being poured over the burlap bag. He couldn’t spit it out fast enough; there was no escape. He was indeed drowning. He was about to die. His back arched, and then he began to convulse. Then it was over, and he was sitting upright again, gasping for air, which burned his lungs, causing him to choke and cough.
“Hunters? There’s nothing to hunt inside my house,” he said in the same mellow, annoyed tone.
“I’m telling you the truth!” Ed coughed. “We just bagged a black bear down by the river. We were looking for shelter. We knocked on the door for over ten minutes! It’s our procedure.” He coughed some more water out.
“Procedure for what?”
“For making contact. We have a procedure for making peaceful contact with houses to see if they are inhabited or not. We also act as ambassadors for Lake City—that’s who we hunt for.”
He could hear footsteps, a door opening and then closing with a locking sound. He was happy to be sitting in the dark alone to catch his breath and thoughts. His mind went from fear for his own survival to fear of the fate of his partner. Where was Shaun?
He lost track of the time he’d been sitting there in the dark. His shoulders were beginning to ache from his arms being restrained behind him, and the smell of wet burlap was stifling. It could have been minutes or maybe hours, but sometime later, the door opened and closed again. The wet burlap bag was forcefully ripped off his head.
He was in a dark room with the classic blinding-bright shop light aimed directly at his face. He squinted, turning his head to the side, trying to protect his eyes from the piercing light turning the inside of eyelids a bright pink. He slowly opened one eye to get a glimpse of his prison or captor.
What he saw made him close his eyes again. Ed began to cry hysterically and mumble incoherent prayers. There was a wide variety of knives and surgical-type saws hanging from a pegboard above a blood-splattered table and pools of coagulated gel on the floor. He was trapped on the real-life set of a sick and twisted slasher movie.
“So you bagged a black bear on my property. You weren’t going to walk all that meat miles back into town. What’s your plan?” the voice said from behind him.
Ed bowed his head, rocking back and forth in his restraining chair, sobbing uncontrollably.
“If you make me ask you again, you’re getting another long drink of water,” the man said in a monotone voice.
“We have radios; we call them to come get us if we successfully harvest any big game. I told you, we have protocols! Where’s Shaun? Did you kill him? Is he OK?”
Ignoring the question, the voice pressed on. “How do they come get you?”
“We have a couple working vehicles. I call in an address, and they come to get us. The town has become really organized again. People are working together. We found some working vehicles, radios, and other stuff in empty houses around the lake.”
“Tell me more about the town,” the voice said as the man walked around the side of the room. The dark room shadowed his upper torso, offering only the image of leather suede boots and a weird digital pattern pants.
Ed went on and on and on, spilling every detail about the town’s food production, water gathering, shared communal jobs, council projects, the new working radio station, law enforcement and security operations, civilian-firearms training, rescue missions, and he even boasted about the community dinners. Sometimes the voice would ask him about specifics, and sometimes he’d just listen.
“I’m guessing you need to check in every so often?”
“Yes, we give a sitrep every night, as soon as the sun goes down, after we have secured a shelter,” Ed said.
“What’s your no-comms plan?”
“Our what?” Ed asked.
“Your no-communications plan?” the voice asked, annoyed. “What happens if you don’t call to check in?”
“Oh. That happens sometimes the farther we get away from town. They only listen for us at night. That’s when Art is listening for the BBN news broadcast on his big radio. If we can’t reach them at night, they know we’ll try again right before the sun comes up. If that doesn’t work, then everyone gets nervous. We try to get to higher ground right away to try again. If we haven’t contacted them by noon, we go back to the last place we reported in, and they’ll send the truck to pick us up there.”
The sound of footsteps walked away, and the door opened and shut again. This time, there was no locking sound. A couple of short minutes later, the door opened again, then the lights came on. Blinded again, Ed squinted his eyes. With his eyes shut, he felt arms wrap around him in an embracing hug.
Opening his eyes again slowly, he could see it was Shaun hugging him, asking him if he was OK. The house-of-horrors room came into full view, and he realized he was in an unfinished basement area used for butchering game, including a fresh deer carcass in the corner next to the bloody table. His numb hands were lifted slightly behind his back, then the handcuffs fell off. His shoulders throbbed, and his arms stung with pin needles as blood rushed back in when he brought his hands in front of him.
A man dressed in a full digital camo uniform with smudged green and brown face paint and a rifle slung across his chest stood in front of him. “It might not seem like it right now, but today is your lucky day. My name is Raymond. This is obviously my house. Come upstairs; I have bear stew cooking, and there’s a hot shower and a clean bed for you tonight. I’ll give you your weapons back in the morning, and you can call into town for our extraction. Yes, our extraction. I’m coming with you.”
Raymond awoke early to fix breakfast for his guests, hoping the gesture would help ease any hard feelings caused by his enhanced information-gathering techniques. He fully understood that his time of battling the Gray demons solo had come to a critical point. Even though he had plenty of weapons, ammo, and supplies, he lacked human resources. As much as he hated modern society, it was time to team up.
The smell of coffee, eggs, and steak must have awoken the hunters, as they came stumbling in with heavy sleep still in their half-open, bloodshot eyes.
“Grab a seat. I hope you’re hungry. Coffee’s hot; help yourself.”
As they ate breakfast, Raymond probed them for more information about the town and about a repeatedly referenced person named Victor, whom they both seemed to have a man-crush on. Ed and Shaun also asked Raymond questions, specifically about his plentiful food stores.
“It’s not by luck. I was prepared. Not for a plague but for challenging ti
mes in general. Most people rely on someone else to rescue them. Seems that self-reliance is an extinct mindset. Take yourselves for example: you’re out here hunting in the woods to feed a community who can’t feed themselves.”
“Yes, we are out here hunting, but the entire community is providing services that we do not have to do ourselves. It’s teamwork. We all work together, and everyone is contributing,” Ed said.
“Everyone?” Raymond asked.
“Well, some more than others,” Shaun said through a mouthful of eggs.
“Others? You should toss those noncontributors out of town. There’ve been leaches feeding off hardworking citizens in every society. Maybe by the time we get a handle on this epidemic, those types will have been culled off, making humanity stronger,” Raymond said reverently.
“That’s pretty harsh,” Shaun said, swallowing.
“It’s the way nature intended. It’s one thing to have protectors of the herd. It’s completely different to rely entirely on a safety blanket that others provide. It forms a society of defenseless victims,” Raymond countered. “It’s time for you to make your extraction call. Here’s my address; tell them to pick us up at noon. While we wait, you’re my working crew. How big of a truck is coming to pick us up?”
Over the next few hours, Raymond used his new hired hands to fill a twenty-foot covered trailer parked in the driveway. In the back of his garage, behind a hinged cabinet, there was a cleverly hidden stairway that led down to a concealed storage room inside his basement. Raymond had built this room for security, and luckily, the metal cages bolted to the thick concrete floor and walls had protected his sensitive electronic devices from the EMP blast.
To relocate everything in this room, he’d need to make several trips into town. Raymond divided up boxes into piles, then told Ed and Shaun what to grab and how to stack it all in the trailer. While they worked, he stood guard on top of the garage to keep an eye on his guests and to watch for Grays. When they finished one task, he gave them a break while he sorted out the next. This went on for hours until finally the entire trailer was full.
“All right, that’ll do it for now. Let’s go inside for lunch until your friends get here,” Raymond said as he locked and secured the door to the hidden stairway. He turned and looked directly at them. “Listen to me. Hear me. This storage room is mine. Not a word about it leaves your lips, or I’ll personally cut out your tongue, tie you to a tree, and then leave you for the infected demons. Do you understand? Not a word—not to your mayor, the sheriff, or this Victor guy that you’ve been going on about. Nobody.” His glare pierced each of them in turn.
Ed and Shaun looked at him wide-eyed, tensely nodding their heads in agreement.
A short time later, Raymond watched an old red truck pull into the driveway. A man and woman stayed in the truck for a few minutes, then got out. The female got out and focused her attention on the wood line in the opposite direction of the house. This gave Raymond a good feeling. They were worried more about threats away from the house, acting defensively instead of offensively toward the house, which the man walked toward, his rifle relaxed at his side in a nonaggressive manner.
Raymond opened the door before the man reached his porch. “We’re having lunch; there’s plenty for both of you.” He waved them in.
The old truck was barely strong enough to pull the trailer’s weight, causing their traveling speed to be terrifyingly slow. Raymond, along with Ed, Shaun, and their black bear meat–cargo, rode exposed in the bed of the truck. Raymond could sense at any moment they would be ambushed by road bandits or swarmed by Grays. His favorite DARPA XM-3 bolt-action rifle was slung across his back, while in his hands he held a piston-driven AR15 with a four-powered fixed magnification Rifle Combat Optic with tritium illuminated red chevron and bullet drop compensating reticle for quick multiple target engagements at different distances.
The trip seemed to take forever. The continuous hum of the slow-turning tires on the hot asphalt road was making him anxious. Raymond was constantly rotating, scanning 360 degrees. Observing bends in the roads, deep ditches where bandits could hide in culverts, tree-line shadows, houses close to the roads, abandoned cars, everywhere really. Because he knew from experience—death could be hiding anywhere.
He stood up, observing the road behind them over the top of the trailer to ensure they were not being pursued. He then turned around to see the town coming into view. Ed and Shaun had informed Raymond about their defense wall project, but he had suspected they were exaggerating. It was impressive, to say the least. Before him stood the Great Wall of Shipping. The town had arranged forty-foot shipping containers in a long row, in some cases stacked two high. The wall was truly a modern, albeit postapocalyptic, marvel of engineering. He wondered how they were able to collect and move the giant boxes.
As they approached, there appeared to be multiple disabled cars in the path leading up to a huge vehicle gate. He’d seen this pattern several times before—the cars were purposefully placed in the road in a very specific pattern, forcing any incoming traffic to slow to a crawl and then swerve left and right sharply through the winding obstacle, thus eliminating any attempts to ram the gate at high speeds. Also visible was a sandbagged guard post on top of the second-story shipping container overlooking the vehicle gate. Most impressive. Raymond liked this Victor guy already.
Raymond mentally gave credit to the driver’s ability; there was no way he could have maneuvered the truck and trailer on the serpentine road. The driver stopped short of the large gate, got out, and identified himself to the guard, whom he clearly already knew. The heavy gate, made of a school bus paneled with corrugated metal siding, slid to the side, allowing the truck and trailer to enter Main Street in Lake City.
Even though grass was growing knee high and weeds overtook flowerbeds, the rest of the town seemed pretty well kept. Raymond assumed the town had been packed the day the lights went out, but all the disabled vehicles had been removed from the streets. He wondered where they’d taken them and why.
The truck pulled up along the city beach near a large open-air pavilion with a small group of people sitting around a long picnic table. Before the truck came to a complete stop, he surveyed the group. He picked out the mayor, an academic-looking lady he presumed was a doctor or teacher, some people he figured were councilmen—especially a particularly over-groomed man in a clean pink collared shirt—and a well-weathered, stout individual leaning against a wooden support pole with a sense of strong confidence yet possessing a reserved air. That must be Victor, Raymond thought.
The group jumped out of the truck, walked toward the pavilion, and began shaking hands with the council. They took turns conducting an informal debrief, talking and answering questions about their journeys. The drivers went first, explaining that everything had gone well, that they had been treated to a gracious lunch, and that the return trip was slow—here they turned to make hand motions toward the long covered trailer—because of the heavy load.
Ed and Shaun went next, going into great detail of all their trials and tribulations up until they killed the black bear. Their story stopped short at the bear harvest; they did not say a word of their activities with Raymond. They stopped talking abruptly, leaving an awkward silence in the air. Raymond was curious whether they were embarrassed that they gotten captured, were scared of repercussions, or if his wonderful cooking had mended any hurt feelings.
He stepped up, extending his hand toward Victor, “I’m Raymond Hessel. I found these two guys breaking into my house last night. After chatting with them, they told me how great of a community you have here.”
The man in the clean pink shirt stood up and smiled. “Well, what do you think so far?”
Raymond knew this guy’s type: he was quick to take credit for everyone else’s hard work without getting his own hands dirty. “It’s OK, I guess. I expected more.” Watching the councilman’s happy expression completely collapse was priceless, and it made Raymond smile inside. But inst
ead of smiling, Raymond simply glanced toward the downtown area as if he was uninterested.
Ignoring the councilman, he turned back to Victor. “I could help you out with your rescue- and security ops. In fact, I have a few neighbors that won’t last a week out there without me; they should be relocated here.”
The rude comment compounded with Victor receiving all the newcomer’s attention, Stanly immediately didn’t seem too fond of this new broad-shouldered Raymond guy. Stanly wondered what kind of decent person had so many tattoos and still used hair gel in the apocalypse? “Let me guess: you’re also a knight in shining armor looking for an action job?” Stanly sneered.
Raymond looked at him briefly, then turned his back to him completely.
“That’s what I thought. We have ourselves another gun-nut cowboy. Mayor, we have enough of these types of people in town already. Do we need another trigger-happy maniac who’s quick to kill just to feel good about his manhood? Just like Victor, they go out there looking for a fight so they can justify violence with more violence,” Stanly fumed.
Raymond spun around and growled, “You’re about to eat your teeth, asshole! You don’t know anything about me. I’ve been protecting and preserving life my entire career. Using myself as a shield to shelter scrawny shits like you for the past twenty years. Sit your pleated pants back down and let the grown-ups talk before I drown you in that lake.”
Raymond turned to the person he presumed to be the mayor, who was sitting next to the uniformed sheriff. “I have a trailer full of weapons, ammo, food, and other useful supplies. It’s not free, but I’ll barter with you fairly for a nice house to live in and my own choice of community duties. I have a special skill set that was not offered cheaply not too long ago.”
