Fallen Earth | Book 1 | Remnants

by Morrow, Jason D.

  The three men stepped forward, each of them revealing their prison uniforms. Two of them carried a prison guard club and the one in the front had a knife in his hands. Leland made sure to keep his shotgun in full view.

  “How many got out?” Leland asked.

  “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

  “How many got out?” Leland repeated.

  “All of them,” one of them said.

  Leland felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He didn’t have much time.

  “I’ve got no interest in apprehending any of you,” Leland said. “We just need to get by with assurances you aren’t going to follow us.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “I was headed for the prison,” Leland said. “That doesn’t seem like a priority anymore.”

  “Officer, I think you might want to hand us your gun and just be on your way.”

  “My gun?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  The answer came with a blow to his back that knocked him to the ground. At first, he’d thought Henry had hit him or kicked him, but when he saw him on the ground next to him, he rolled onto his back and saw a large man with a club, raising it for the kill, ready to crush his skull. The man must have been hiding in the ditch behind them.

  Leland swore and kicked without any aim, his foot landing near the prisoner’s groin. The man doubled over, and Leland got to his feet and swung his shotgun around. The three prisoners were charging him, but Leland pumped the shotgun and pulled the trigger. All three men fell to the ground. Two of them writhed on the road and the middle one lay still.

  Leland spun around to the prisoner that had attacked them to find Henry stomping on the man repeatedly. He stopped before killing the man, but just barely.

  The two of them looked at each other for a moment and suddenly Leland wasn’t sure what to do. Was there a point in keeping Henry with him? It wouldn’t mean anything to let him go, not with the mass prison break. He looked at the men on the ground next, then at the man Henry had beaten within an inch of his life.

  “You know any of them?” Leland asked.

  “Not that I can tell,” Henry said. “A lot of people in that prison.”

  “Well, not anymore,” Leland said. He chewed his lip and shook his head.

  “Listen, sheriff,” Henry started, but Leland held up a finger, his blood starting to boil inside him.

  He got close to Henry, his jaws clenching over and over. “You want to be a free man?”

  “I want to get away, yes.”

  Leland pointed at the man on the ground Henry had taken down. “Then I might need you for what you just did to him.”

  “What?”

  “If there are a number of prisoners in Hope, then I need all the help I can get. I’ve got a daughter in there and I’m not letting her get in the middle of all this.”

  “Sheriff, she might already be in the middle of all this.”

  Leland didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to believe it. There was still a chance that most of the prisoners had just gone their separate ways and spread out all over the countryside. There was a chance that Savage’s promise of going after Leland and his family was empty, and with the chance of freedom, he’d tried to escape for good.

  He couldn’t take that chance.

  “Take my cuffs off and I will help you,” Henry said.

  Leland looked at him for a moment, thinking about the offer. It was a pretty good deal for Henry. He wouldn’t be much of an effective fighter with handcuffs. He had to get to Hope. He had to make sure Gwen was okay. Was his offer legal? No. It went against everything he’d been trained to do. It went against everything he had ever known as an officer of the law, but he either needed a willing partner to help him make sure his daughter was okay, or he needed to get there alone. He couldn’t be walking his slow pace, pushing a restrained prisoner for the next five miles in the darkness. Besides, he could run into ten more groups of prisoners just like this one, and he only had so many shotgun shells left.

  Leland reached for his keys and uncuffed Henry.

  “I’m counting on your word that you’re going to help me. All I want is to keep my daughter safe. Once that’s done, you can go wherever you want, but I’m not going to do anything to keep you from getting caught by someone else.”

  Henry nodded, rubbing his wrists. Leland wondered if the fugitive was about to take off into the woods and leave him in the middle of the road, but instead he said, “Well, let’s get going then.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Gwen woke up, she was lying on the bed in a jail cell. It was the old kind of cell, the kind with bars that let her see out across the room to the entire sheriff’s office. It wasn’t meant for long-time offenders, just those who needed to sleep off a hangover and accept their citation, or a belligerent spouse too angry to think about their actions. It was preventative in function rather than a punishment. Now it was preventing Gwen from escaping.

  She was startled by a voice at the other end of the small cell. Bryson McClure was standing at the other side, his nose to one of the black bars.

  “They didn’t do anything to you,” he whispered. “They just threw you in here and locked it back up. They didn’t even say anything to me.”

  Gwen sat up in the bed and looked at him, a guy who liked to roar his truck engine downtown in the middle of the night just to wake up the neighborhood. Sometimes he did it when he was drunk. Or high. Her dad had told her why he had been locked up tonight, but she had forgotten it had happened so many times. He was a little older than she was, probably twenty.

  “I set you on the bed, though, hope that’s okay.” He turned toward the prisoners. “I could have killed them for knocking you in the head like that. No need for it.”

  When she looked out, she saw the four prisoners rifling through her dad’s desk, no doubt looking for weapons. There was a room with several large gun cases. Gwen knew it was filled to the brim with her dad’s collection. If the prisoners wanted to know the combinations, they would have to look in the third drawer of her father’s desk, in the third folder, on the third sheet of paper. There was a sticky note with all they would need.

  She shuddered to think about what they would do with the weapons in there.

  Her dad was a gun enthusiast, to say the least. Almost none of the weapons in the closet were owned by the county and were part of his personal collection from over the years. She figured it had been a habit of the trade, having learned about all the kinds of guns used by criminals, most specifically the cartel. Her dad would sometimes come home with a new gun, a grin on his face, and say he was just trying to do some research. The research had often led the family to the local gun range with goggles and ear protection that nearly engulfed Gwen’s entire head. She considered it a valuable experience, though. If anything it was something that connected her with her dad, and she could see a genuine smile on his face when he was teaching his kids about an M4 or a Soviet SKS.

  He hadn’t collected a single gun since Travis died, though. In fact, instead of keeping his guns in the house like he used to, he had the safes moved to his office so no one could get to them, where they would remain hidden from view.

  It was curious to her why he held on to them. Sure, the guns weren’t what killed Travis. Travis killed Travis. But her father ignored the guns and put them away, never to be mentioned, never to be used, yet he couldn’t seem to let them go. Maybe as a reminder that they weren’t something to be trusted—to keep your enemies close, kind of thing. Gwen didn’t know.

  She looked up at Bryson and felt a surge of panic, though she was sure to keep her voice low. “You can’t tell them who I am.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t tell them I’m Sheriff West’s daughter,” she said. “We can’t let them get the guns in the closet.”

  “There are guns in the closet?”

  She held a finger to her mouth and shook her he
ad. “I don’t want to give them a reason to use me for anything.”

  “Where is your dad?” Bryson said. “Why isn’t he in here?”

  Gwen shook her head. “I can only assume it has something to do with the power outage. Maybe a prison break.” She motioned to the four men in jumpsuits, one of whom noticed she was awake.

  “Hey there, doll, sorry to hit you in the head like that.” The other three looked up, and they all walked toward the cell. Bryson backed away and sat on the bed next to her. “We didn’t want to take any chance of you being a cop or something. You’re not a cop, are you? You didn’t have a badge or identification.”

  “No,” Gwen answered. “I was on a walk. Heard some noise. Came in here to see what it was.”

  “You’re not a cop, but you have a key to the jailhouse?”

  Gwen tried not to show her frustration. She had forgotten how she had gotten in here in the first place. Of course they would have found the key on her.

  “Receptionist,” Gwen said quickly.

  The prisoner looked back at the room and shook his head. “This is the sheriff’s office, right? There’s only one desk. Where does he sit all day if you’re busy doing the receptioning?”

  Gwen’s lips parted. She was terrible at this. “I, uh…in his car…”

  “Who are you, sweetie?”

  Gwen didn’t answer. Her hands shook and she wanted out of the cell. “Please,” she said. “Can’t you just let us out of here?”

  “I’ve been instructed to come in here and ransack the sheriff’s office,” the prisoner said. “I was told this is where I would find some guns.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Are there guns here?”

  “No, who said there was?”

  One of the other prisoners spoke up next. “Some old guy. We went into his house because we wanted some food. We asked him where we could get weapons. We threatened to shoot him and his wife. He told us here. Savage told us to search it.”

  “Yeah, then he killed them both,” another prisoner said with a laugh.

  Gwen felt sick. Did he just say Savage? As in Jim Savage?

  Gwen swallowed and shook her head. “I don’t know anything.”

  The prisoner let the key dangle in front of his face. “Oh, I think you do.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Alex counted seven people dead in the town of Hope so far, and those didn’t include the ones unreported by prisoners on the fringes of town. It could have been more.

  There were fifty or so prisoners under Savage’s command and all of them seemed bloodthirsty as if this were the day each of them had been preparing for, as though he had been indoctrinating them for years. Maybe he had. There was only so much a prison guard could learn from inmates just by observing them day-to-day. None of them were privy to private conversations and code languages they might create in their spare time. Guards learned enough of the lingo, but things weren’t always in context, and influence was often gained, not by direct communication, but by word of mouth. What kind of influence could Savage have gained throughout the prison without even talking to most of these men? How many of them worshipped him to some degree because someone else talked about how great he was?

  They feared him. They respected him. They wanted to be him. And when he gave orders, he did so expecting them to be obeyed, and his lackeys expected nothing in return. They wanted to please their master. If he offered them a hint of praise, that meant something. If he so much as nodded his approval, they would stick out their chests with confidence.

  Savage had a hold over them Alex would never truly understand. More than that, he couldn’t understand Savage himself. Why was he keeping Alex alive? The prisoner had barely looked at him during the five-mile hike from the prison to Hope, and once they got there he had ordered a couple of inmates to guard Alex and keep him safe from the others. This, out of Savage’s entire asinine line of decisions throughout the night, made no sense to Alex. Keep him alive because Savage found him intriguing? Wasn’t Alex a threat to him? Was he being kept around in case they needed a hostage? There were hundreds of people in this town, so there were no shortage of hostages.

  His two guards didn’t pay him much attention and even seemed to resent him because they were missing out on what was happening around Hope.

  Alex sat on the sidewalk outside the town’s grocery store as about five inmates gathered carts full of food and water. Alex had been surprised to see the power completely out in the town as well, and it further confirmed his theory that whatever was happening was a big deal. It was especially strange to him when the inmates had tried to hotwire some vehicles at the prison and couldn’t get a single car started.

  Everything was just…dead.

  He thought about his parents, wondering if they were awake yet, or if they knew about anything going on in Hope. They would know soon enough. Alex knew he had to avoid them if he could. They wouldn’t think to ignore him or pretend they didn’t know him. If they saw him and waved or got excited, Alex would be revealed as a liar and Savage would deem that a good enough reason to execute him. Still, Alex couldn’t have told Savage the truth. If he had said his parents were in Hope, Savage would have found them and brought them out right away.

  He understood that Savage had a vendetta against the sheriff here, but did the other prisoners realize that Savage was just using them to get his revenge?

  Alex had read the stories. He knew a little of what had happened here between the sheriff and Savage, but he had a hard time remembering the exact issue. Whatever the case, these inmates were happy to be here under Savage’s command, and since it was the middle of the night, it wouldn’t take long for them to take over the whole town.

  Alex didn’t have restraints on his wrists, and if one of the prisoners near him hadn’t had a shotgun, he might have made a run for it. But he had made it this far. He didn’t want to tempt fate by giving his guard a reason to shoot him.

  His head jerked up at the sound of a commotion about a hundred yards away—the sound of a woman’s voice yelling as a couple of men in jumpsuits pulled at her, dragging her toward the grocery store.

  Savage stepped through one of the shattered windows onto the sidewalk near Alex and his two guards. The bald man had an intensity in his eyes easily seen even in the darkness of night. He walked out into the parking lot to meet the men and the woman. When they were close enough, Alex could see she was probably a teenager.

  “Found this one in the sheriff’s office,” one of the inmates said. “She got in with this.” He held up a set of keys for Savage to take.

  Savage took the keys and studied them for a moment, then looked at the girl. “So, your daddy’s the local sheriff and you went looking for him.”

  Don’t lie to him, Alex thought over and over. Don’t lie to him.

  The girl stared at him, her mouth hanging open. Alex could tell she was thinking about denying what he said, but then she changed her mind and let her head drop.

  Savage looked up at the other inmates. “There is no other reason a teenager would have a key to the sheriff’s office.” He smiled at himself as though he had just scored a twisted personal victory.

  “There’s a closet in the back with a few gun safes in it,” one said. “Can’t get into them, but I bet she knows a way.”

  “What’s it worth to you?” Savage asked her.

  She looked up at him, shaking her head. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what is it worth to you? That information? Is it worth torture? Is it worth me handing you over to my colleagues? Is it worth you being my personal companion for the rest of your life, which, I admit, won’t be very long?”

  The girl clenched her jaw. “You touch me and see what happens to you.”

  Savage laughed, and on cue, so did the inmates surrounding the girl. “Let me guess, your daddy will get very angry and kill us all.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “There are a lot more of us than yo
u realize. Besides, where is he now? He’s left his town to us, it seems. Maybe he saw us coming and ran away in fear.”

  The girl didn’t respond, but she had a look that said Savage’s hypothesis wasn’t possible. There was a fire in her eyes. A confidence Alex had rarely seen in anyone. Perhaps she didn’t know who she was talking to, or maybe she didn’t care. Still, there was an advantage to this girl being the sheriff’s daughter, both for the girl and for Savage.

  For the girl, she got to live for a while. Being the daughter of the only law enforcement officer within miles—the only possible threat to their newfound freedom—at least bought her time until they could kill him and no longer be worried. For Savage, because he had leverage against the only true threat they faced.

  Alex didn’t know what their plan was. He didn’t understand why most of these inmates weren’t running off through the woods and shedding their uniforms and replacing them with civilian clothes. In their minds, what was keeping them from being taken down by a SWAT team at any moment? Who was to say that word hadn’t gotten out to a neighboring city—one with adequate power and working vehicles?

  It came down to Savage’s determination that this wasn’t just a localized event, and that it wasn’t just temporary. That, or he was suicidal and didn’t mind taking fifty other prisoners down with him.

  “She’s valuable to us,” Savage said. “Throw her back into the cell. And don’t touch her without my permission.” The inmates obeyed and pulled the girl away. Savage didn’t have to threaten them. He didn’t have to be explicitly clear in his instructions. They weren’t going to touch her. They respected him enough to leave her alone.

  Savage sighed and sat on the sidewalk next to Alex and looked up at the stars. “It’s a beautiful night,” he said. “A little cold, but the sky is clear. Do you ever catch yourself looking up at the stars, Alex? Do you ever wonder if there is anything out there bigger than us? More intelligent than us?”

  Alex looked at him but didn’t answer. Savage didn’t seem to want one and continued.