The Unraveling: Book 1 of the Bound to Survive Series

by Charley Hogwood

  His buddy on the other end of the phone was already drunk with the other misfits back at the house and told him to quit screwing around get back with the new liquor before the party went dry. Then the line went dead.

  The intense pain–and realization that help was not coming–was moving the young zombie toward delirium as he shambled through the woods moaning, looking for help he would not find.

  The men who left earlier had taken a lot of food that Glendora was counting on. “I’m sorry y’all, we had so much more food before they showed up.” Glendora was understandably melancholy.

  “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing. You saved a lot of supplies and the most important thing to me is that you are safe,” Tim reassured her.

  Cal walked back in from outside. “Well, that is all we can carry on this trip. Some of it needs to stay refrigerated. If we stay much longer the cold food will spoil.”

  “So will they,” Charlotte said, pointing to the bodies on the floor. Looking at the bloody tablecloths draped over the three dead men she had an idea.

  “Let’s put them in the big refrigerator.”

  Glendora shivered at the thought of moving the bodies but Charlotte was right. If they left the bodies out, they would go bad quickly.

  “That’s a good idea,” Cal replied.

  The guys maneuvered the bodies into the table cloths and struggled to drag them toward the walk-in cooler. They thought they were finished until Charlotte saw the detached arm over by the potato chip rack. She was not about to pick that up. As Charlotte tried to work out how she was going to get the arm back to its body, Glendora grabbed a manure shovel from the hardware section, scraped it up like a dead snake, and took it to the cooler. Standing there, holding an arm in a shovel like it was no big deal, she looked at Tim, who appeared to be attempting to comprehend something surreal.

  “Ahem.” Glendora nodded toward the big insulated door.

  “OH!” Tim snapped out of it and opened the door so Glendora could toss the heavy arm inside, onto the body pile. She leaned the bloody shovel against the wall of the cooler.

  “Poor Sammy, he was a good kid. I need to try his parents again. They are not answering.”

  Charlotte intervened, “Let’s get out of here and do that at the house. Maybe we should leave a note on the door in case the police show up.”

  The group closed up the store and left a note on the front door for the police.

  Cal lead the convoy back to the house with Charlotte behind in her car and Tim driving Glendora’s car, with her riding passenger. The trip was short and Tim found himself reaching over to hold Glendora’s hand. He was beginning to develop some real feelings for her lately. Today’s episode scared him more than he expected.

  “I feared for the worst today when Cal told me what happened on the way over. I am glad you are ok,” he said sincerely.

  She squeezed his hand, “Dear sir, do you have intentions to declare?” She was trying to feel better and decided to seize the moment in Deep South fashion.

  “Well milady, it would just not be proper to force you to endure my advances. You barely know me.” Tim replied in his best Tennessee dialect. They both laughed a little. It was a start to moving forward. They had a long way to go but the spark had happened.

  The group of cars pulled onto Cal’s property. The driveway wound around some tropical trees then split left to the house and right to the workshop. Cal led the procession to the workshop and parked as close as possible to facilitate unloading of the food boxes.

  They squeezed as much as they could in the refrigerators but there was still cold food left out.

  “We didn’t quite finish the wiring earlier. Let’s see if we can quickly wrap that up,” Cal suggested.

  Charlotte had an idea. “How about I plan a dinner for the group with some of it?”

  Glendora was onboard with that and they set out to prepare a feast for the crowd.

  Tim and Cal made pretty quick work of the electrical wiring and had the last freezer cooling down quickly.

  With all the food stacked in the workshop, they set off to the house to clean up.

  “You know,” Cal said to Tim as they were walking, “with all that refrigeration we could be in trouble if the power drops out. I have some generators at my office. As a matter of fact, after what just happened at the store, I’m worried about some of my equipment being left unsupervised.”

  “Do you want to go pick it up? I can help,” Tim offered.

  Cal thought for a moment. “That might be a good idea. I expect work to get back to normal in a few weeks and I’ll need tools left to work with. Come to think of it, it may be wise to bring the trailers home too. I have a mobile office we could use for extra storage space and maybe even a group office. I also have a toy hauler that I can use to bring the generators home. Do you know how to drive a trailer?” Cal asked.

  “Well, I may be from Tennessee, but even we had some of them fancy rollin’ homes, too,” Tim said, mockingly. They both laughed. Tim and Cal were getting along like old buddies.

  The plan was to head to Cal’s office and grab the generators, some of the expensive tools, the toy hauler, and one of the fleet of Duallys to tow the thirty-foot temporary office trailer home.

  Cal updated Charlotte on the plan. They expected to be home before long. The office was over by the Turnpike, not far from St. Agatha’s Hospital. The guys hopped into Cal’s pickup and headed out.

  After a twenty minute ride, they pulled up to the gate at the yard. Cal noticed the gate was closed but not chained.

  “Something’s wrong, the chain is cut.” The two men stepped out of the truck. At that point they were carrying their firearms again. They had decided to keep a firearm close at all times after the trouble they had seen.

  Cal walked through the gate looking around suspiciously. He noticed one of the shipping containers he used as tool storage was open and an old beaten up minivan was parked out of view of the road.

  The guys raised their weapons and moved to the Conex.

  “Put your hands up! Don’t move! We’re armed!” he said to the man in the container wrestling a very large generator toward the door. The man turned around in the dim light of the metal Conex. Cal vaguely recognized him.

  “Hey, aren’t you… you work here. On Jose’s crew over at the hospital. You just started a few days ago.”

  “Yes, boss. I’m sorry. I have small children and our electricity is turned off. I don’t have a way to keep the baby’s food cold. I just wanted to borrow a machine until the lights came back on. No one was here when I came. I wasn’t stealing, I promise,” the laborer said.

  Cal lowered his rifle.

  “Listen, I do not appreciate people taking things from the company without permission. I fire people for that. Let’s do this. That generator is way too big and will use too much gas. Take the little Honda over there and use it only for small things. Okay? I expect you to bring it back as soon as the power comes back on or I am going to your house to get it and have you arrested. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, boss. Thank you, thank you.” The man said something in Spanish that sounded gracious. He loaded the smaller gennie and drove away.

  “Well, that was what I was worried about. I don’t mind helping these guys out but I still cannot trust all of them,” Cal said to Tim.

  “Hey, wait a minute. All the new hammer drills and concrete saws are missing. We just bought those for the hospital renovation. Son of a b… ”

  Cal made a mental note to go find his tools later. “Let’s load a few of the remaining expensive items into the trailer and get back.” They hooked Cal’s truck up to the lightweight toy hauler and Cal pulled one of the Duallys to the office trailer and made the connection, with Tim’s help. They rolled the trucks and trailers out the gate and headed back to Cal’s house.

  24

  Chapter 24

  Thursday, January 11th

  Loxahatchee, Florida

  Rusty and Shane were away f
rom home leaving Heidi, Rusty’s wife, alone for a few hours. Heidi was taking the opportunity to get some things done while the boys were not underfoot. Since it was January in South Florida, the weather was a cool 65 degrees today. It rarely dropped below 70 and when it did, you would swear it was the apocalypse. People began to bundle up like an ice age was underway.

  Heidi had the windows open to draw in some fresh air for the first time this season, but along with the cool air was the never-ending dust from the dirt road. Every time a car traveled down the dead-end road faster than a speed of 5 miles an hour, a cloud reminiscent of the great dust bowl would roil up and blow at the window screens.

  A black SUV the size of a Chevy Suburban exceeded the 5 mph rule and aggravated Heidi when the cloud came in and settled on the table she had just dusted. She walked over to close the windows as a concession to the rude people in the world who didn’t seem to care about dirt road rules.

  She was in Rusty’s gun room, as he called it, when she heard a knock at the door. She was not expecting anyone, and most people wouldn’t pass through the big gate out by the street. Especially one that held a sign that indicated a ferocious carnivore lived there.

  Turns out that since the carnivore was sound asleep in the house, the visitors negated the sign.

  All she could see from the window was a black SUV parked out on the street, not pulled into the driveway. It did seem odd to her but the next thing she heard was the full-on shattering of the rear sliding glass door. It came down in an explosive crash. That startled her and she wasn’t sure what had happened. It did not take long before she realized trouble had arrived. It was a home invasion.

  Rusty had always prepared for such an occurrence, even though they were rare. He knew that keeping so many tools and guns in a house was a risk and made him a target. Gun thefts had exploded in recent months. Most of the thefts were from gun stores, where they were stored in large numbers along with plenty of ammo, but home thefts were also up. Heidi wasn’t sure that that was the motive, but she wasn’t about to ask.

  Rusty had insisted she be prepared in case someone broke in and she was conveniently in the right room for it. The bad news was that she was in the room they would probably be looking for. Heidi and Rusty did not have any children, so it was easier to have loaded weapons lying around, and Heidi needed one of those right now.

  The first thing Heidi saw when looking for something to defend herself with was a Benelli M4 semi-automatic shotgun.

  She locked the door to the room and picked up the Benelli. Remembering how Rusty taught her to check for a round in the chamber, she slightly eased the bolt to the rear just enough to see the shiny brass cup at the base of the 12-gauge round in the breech. Satisfied that it was loaded, she released the bolt to spring back forward. She gave it a look to be sure the bolt was in battery and ready to fire. She rolled the gun over and took a glance at the safety. She made sure that the color visible was red, not white. She forgot how many rounds it held but was pretty confident that whatever type of ammo Rusty had loaded into the gun was deadly enough, if it came to that.

  Heidi’s phone was in the other room so she couldn’t even dial for help; she had no choice but to make a stand. She ducked down behind the large gun safe in the room and aimed the barrel at the door. She heard the men moving through the house until one of them managed to find to the room with their new large dog. Heidi was still not sure where the dog came from, just that Rusty brought him home the other night. He never elaborated on the Amber and Mandy rescue.

  The dog was locked in a large crate, and while it scared the hell out of one of the men, the dog could not get out of the crate to be of any assistance. At this point, the invaders did not think anyone was home.

  One of the men grabbed the knob to enter the gun room and realized it was locked. The group focused their attention on that room. If it was locked, there must be something of value within. One of the men gave the door a big kick and almost had it open. One more kick and the door flew open. The door kicker must have forgotten the most important rules of breaching: stay off the X and don’t stand in the fatal funnel. The concept of the fatal funnel is simple, a door is a choke point and all a defender has to do is draw you in and pick you off as you enter.

  This tactical genius must have missed that class, but Heidi knew better. She unleashed the first 12 gauge round at the man. But the round felt funny to her. She expected a big mule kick from the shotgun but the recoil was lighter than expected. It turned out that Rusty had a flechette round loaded in the chamber and not a slug or large buckshot.

  A flechette round is not buckshot; rather it is a bundle of short, razor-tipped arrows or darts that are launched en masse from the barrel, like a beehive of death.

  The flechette round confused everyone involved, especially the guy who had a chest full of them. He did not fall backward with a punch, he just kept walking into the room, not sure of what had just happened. The darts impacted his chest and stopped in his heart, temporarily sealing their own holes, allowing the man to just feel a wave of nausea.

  The other two men behind him followed him into the room in confusion, but Heidi made the situation clear to them very quickly. She squeezed the trigger of the semi-auto shotgun at the second contestant and something entirely different happened. Rusty had loaded the shotgun in something called salt-and-pepper style. This meant he alternated the types of rounds lined up in the tube. The next round was commonly known as a Dragon’s Breath round.

  Dragon’s Breath is an incendiary round that is filled with a wad of magnesium pellets that burn like the sun and leave the shotgun barrel like a blazing flamethrower. The flames normally travel over one hundred feet but the invader was only about six feet away as he entered the room, so the fire caught him in the gut.

  In the fracas, Heidi accidentally squeezed the trigger a third time. The two men entering the room flew out of the door and fell in a crumple in the kitchen across the way. The whole kitchen was becoming alight with little pockets of magnesium fire and the invaders were down in the middle of it.

  The first guy, with the chest full of flechettes, fell to his knees in the gun room, clutching his chest but getting no air. He fell face-forward on the floor.

  Heidi did not dare squeeze the trigger again at him. She had to get out of the room. Still holding the shotgun, she ran out into the living room where she saw one last guy. Apparently, the SUV driver who had heard the gunfire and came running in from the street to help his buddies. They surprised each other. Heidi raised the shotgun and squeezed. No fire this time, but it was another specialty round, something called grapeshot. This is a round that paid homage to the cannons of old, where two cannonballs are wired together so that when fired, they flew a wire through the air to damage sailing masts on ships.

  In this case, the cannonballs were much smaller, but still large enough. The inertia of the spreading balls carried the wire right at the throat of the last invader. As the wire hit his throat, the balls looped around and tangled with each other, essentially forming a garrote and choking him to death. With his eyes bulging, he grabbed at the wire taut against his throat. In a deepening purple wave of cyanosis, the last man dropped to his knees clawing at his throat.

  Heidi ran for the garage and grabbed two big fire extinguishers located near the workbench and set to trying to save the house from the kitchen fire. She was right in the fight when Rusty and Shane came running in. Without asking questions, they all worked to extinguish the many pockets of fire.

  They managed to get the fire out, but the kitchen and half of the living room was a smoldering loss.

  The guys had not immediately seen the invaders on the floor since they were in firefighting mode and when they did, the lifeless forms looked like charred furniture.

  “What happened, did the oven catch on fire?” Rusty asked.

  Heidi looked at him like he was clueless. “Umm, HELLO.” She pointed at the black-clad invaders scattered around the house. “I was in the other room w
hen I heard a knock and a few seconds later the back slider crashed open. They came running in and went through the house. I was in the gun room and grabbed the first thing I saw, which was a shotgun.” She replayed the events to Rusty and Shane, who were standing there dumbfounded. Then she started half swatting Rusty like a grandma with a broom on a petulant child. “What the hell did you have loaded in that thing! I almost burned the house down!”

  “We were going to do a YouTube video on specialty shotgun ammo we found at the gun show. I didn’t know you were going to go all Lara Croft in the living room,” Rusty defended himself.

  Trying to bring the tension down he added, “If it’s any consolation, the next round in the tube was a drone catcher net. You could’ve been like Batman.”

  Heidi was not amused and swatted him again. Shane, on the other hand, could not resist saying, “I’m Batman.”

  The three of them finally came down from the adrenaline rush of the events and began to digest what had actually happened. The room took a somber tone as they looked around at the smoke-filled and charred remains of the house and the dead invaders.

  Rusty took Heidi to another room to sit for a minute and asked Shane to go look at the black SUV for anything helpful while he attempted to call the police.

  After ten tries to 911, Rusty finally got an answer.

  “911. Is this an emergency?” the operator answered.

  “Yes, we just had a home invasion,” Rusty replied.

  “Are there any injuries?”

  “Yes we have four invaders down and not responsive,” Rusty continued.

  “You say they are non-responsive, do you mean you think they are dead?”

  “Yes, definitely dead.”

  “Are there any other life threatening injuries?”