Minus America | Book 5 | Hostile Shores

by Isherwood, E. E.

  “Are you okay?” he asked when it looked like Kyla was breathing normally.

  “Yeah. What are we going to do?” She’d pulled her rifle from her shoulder and had it at the ready, which was good, but he’d never see his sister’s little girl as a fighter capable of killing. It’s what was soon going to be required. He was sure of it.

  “I’m going to go up to the side of the cabin. I need you to find a good spot to aim your rifle in that direction and cover me. Do you understand?”

  She slumped a fraction of an inch. “You want me to stay behind.”

  “No,” he said with meaning. “I need you out here so if someone surprises me from around the front or back of the house, you’ll shoot to kill. This isn’t a demotion.” He wasn’t being sexist, or ageist, but it wouldn’t make any sense to have her run up to the building and leave him out in the woods. He had more experience dealing with bad men up close.

  Fortunately, she seemed to agree with the logic. “Okay, I’ll be ready, but if there’s a reason to come in, I’ll be up there in a heartbeat.”

  It seemed like a healthy compromise. There wasn’t time to run through every possibility. His hope was he’d sneak up on the bad guys and put a bullet through their heads before they even knew he was there.

  He snuck toward the house, moving fast from one tree to the next. He came at a diagonal, approaching the rear corner of the building, assuming he was out of sight of the back windows and the lone window on the side. When he arrived, the voices of those inside were immediately obvious.

  After checking to ensure Kyla was still in her hiding spot, he crept under the window and went toward the front porch. As he approached, the voices became clearer. At least two men were speaking in mocking tones, while one woman wept.

  Gripping his rifle, he waited for three or four minutes, desperate to hear if there were more of them. A quick peek toward the front driveway revealed a red four-door car with a black SUV parked behind it.

  For a few seconds, he wondered if the people inside were like him. Americans who survived the initial terror attack but weren’t aware of the invasion. They could have come out of a hole in the ground and were now finding this abandoned house, as he and his friends did a couple of days before. But why was the woman in tears?

  Still ready to shoot to kill, he slowly peeked around the corner. When he saw the young girl, he thought it was Tabby, from the NORAD bunker. She was dressed in a tight-fitting blue outfit, which seemed like a cross between a running outfit and a one-piece swimming suit. She had her hands over her face, apparently crying in fear from the men.

  Two men, with their backs to him, were dressed in all black.

  No matter who they were, he had his golden opportunity.

  “Hands up!” he barked, revealing himself.

  Cheyenne Mountain Western Exit, CO

  “I was joking!” Tabby said mockingly.

  Dwight was beside himself with anger, but the run had taken every ounce of his strength. The white light had cured him of his mental problems and given him a taste of what it would be like to have a functional body, but the years of hard labor in the concrete labyrinths of downtown San Francisco hadn’t gone away completely. He realized the irony of wanting to yell at the girl for trying to escape him while simultaneously being unable to talk. Why she’d stopped was anyone’s guess, but he was glad for the rest.

  “I never wanted to hurt you. I only wanted to get you back to safety. Back here, to NORAD.” She pointed at the dank tube they’d all squeezed through the day before. Without thinking, he recoiled at the thought.

  “I’ll…never…go…back!”

  She put her hands in front of her. “No, you don’t have to go anywhere. I thought they’d be here.”

  He looked all around. “You mean Poppy?”

  Tabby hesitated. “Yeah, even your bird. I was also hoping to find Peter and Audrey.”

  “I’ve got them!” a man shouted from close to the dirt path.

  “I knew it!” a second guy replied to his buddy.

  The two men crept closer, holding rifles on him and Tabby. He belatedly remembered the pistol sitting on the rock, left there by Tabby.

  While they approached, Tabby seemed unable to move. He used the opportunity to get closer to her, if only so he would be there when he asked her some more questions. Dwight figured they would be taken back to the campground, where he would find out the fate of his friend once and for all.

  “We can’t stay here,” Tabby whispered.

  “I don’t have the pistol you left behind,” he replied dryly. “I can’t fight back.”

  She sighed, putting her hands up.

  A man pushed a dirt bike on the path, adding a third man to the people surrounding them. They were dressed in black, though, signaling they were the same group who fired at Poppy.

  “Have you seen my bird?” he asked loudly.

  One of the men laughed. He was the same guy who’d driven the ATV the day before. “You’re a one-hit wonder, aren’t you? Everything is about that damned bird. Well, genius, did you ever think you might be the one in trouble?”

  “We surrender,” Tabby said dejectedly. “I’m kind of tired of this guy myself.”

  Dwight experienced a pang of rejection. Not unlike much of his life on the streets. Many tourists openly mocked him, told him to get lost, or get a job, or a hundred other things. He’d thought he’d be used to it, but the little girl’s words smarted.

  The men came closer. There were three of them, as best he could tell. When they were all standing in the clearing, they ordered Tabby to take off her rifle and drop it on the ground. He almost asked her where she’d put her pistols, but he was less concerned about that than her rejection.

  “I’m tired of you, lady. I’ve asked you all this time where you saw my Poppy and you’ve not told me a damned thing. My brain might be on the fritz, but I know a jerk when I see one.”

  Suddenly, the girl was the one who appeared hurt. He came an inch away from saying he was a tiny bit sorry, but the air was split by the sound of a firecracker.

  “What the—” one of the invaders cried out.

  Dwight put his hands up, not sure what was going on.

  Tabby ran backwards.

  Another couple of cracks belted out of the woods from a direction he couldn’t figure out. One of the men standing in front of him began bleeding from a hole on the side of his head. When he fell over sideways and slapped onto the pine needle ground, Dwight still wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do.

  A squawk came in on the wind.

  “I should get down?” he said dreamily.

  He crouched, noticing Tabby had found a tree at the edge of the clearing.

  The next few moments fizzled by in freeze frames, as if his brain couldn’t keep up with the action.

  The dead man on the ground stayed dead. A pool of blood gathered under his head.

  A second man fired in multiple directions, including at Dwight himself. While he’d ducked down, he had the sense it wasn’t helping his chances of staying alive. However, before he could get up and move back toward the line of trees with Tabby, the man stopped moving. If a wind-up toy had finally run out of string, the slumping end would have looked exactly like the guy in black.

  The last guy almost made it to his own tree. Whoever was shooting at him took several more shots. He also saw Tabby use her pistol, creating more noise in Dwight’s ears.

  Only when the popping turned off did his brain put his vision into its normal flow. Looking up, he swore he saw Poppy’s blue-and-red feathers high up in the pine canopy, but he was distracted by Tabby and her two young friends. They hugged and hollered in celebration.

  It appeared as if he’d been rescued.

  So, why wasn’t he happy, like them?

  CHAPTER 20

  Glendo, WY

  “Hands up!” Ted yelled again.

  At first, the men were willing to comply and put their hands up. However, before they turned around t
o face him, the man closest to the front door of the house tried to dive inside.

  He wanted to fire, but the girl stood farther down the porch. She looked at his weapon with nothing but fear. The perspective allowed him to confirm it wasn’t Tabby, yet he still didn’t want to accidentally hit the innocent girl.

  “Get down!” he yelled at her.

  She was beside herself with tears. He recognized the terror and knew she wasn’t going anywhere. The other man on the porch slowly turned around. Since he was about six feet from the front door, he must have made the calculation he was too far. However, he took a step backward, closer to the young woman.

  “Don’t take another step!” Ted yelled, still standing at the edge of the low porch.

  The man stopped. He was clean-shaven, with a short haircut. His face was wider than it was tall, and he smiled in a disarming manner. But he also had a blotch of red on his cheek, a cut that was still bleeding freely. Looking at Ted, he calmly kept his hands near his head. “Hey, we don’t want any trouble. What unit are you with?”

  He remembered he was dressed like them.

  “I’m an American, actually. Excuse me for not being more hospitable, but you’re standing on my property.” He aimed his rifle steadily at the man’s grinning face.

  “This is your cabin?” the wounded man asked.

  “This is my damned country, you asshole.”

  “Uncle!” Kyla cried out.

  He turned to see the other man hanging out of the side window. In the few seconds he’d been focused on the man on the porch, his partner had tried to get the drop on him. Ted had half a second to plan his next, and possibly last, move.

  Rather than turn and shoot at the sneaky guy, he stepped onto the porch. The man in the window fired a moment too late. Ted, however, already had his target prepared. Once he aimed at the man on the porch, the guy’s cocky smile was wiped right off his face…

  He tightened his sight picture on the man’s chest to avoid hitting the girl, then he put a shot on the target.

  A second blast came out of the woods.

  Looking forward, and walking past the front window, he moved toward the now-stumbling man and pumped several more rounds into his chest.

  The girl in the blue outfit screamed in terror.

  He had to ignore her. He ran next to the front door and paused. There were no more shots coming from the side of the house, so he wondered if Kyla had hit him. If the man was still alive, he could be lurking right inside the door. If he was dead, there would be no way to tell, except by peeking in.

  “Kyla, you okay?” he yelled, knowing it wouldn’t give her away. She’d already shot, so the bad guy knew there were at least two of them.

  “Yeah!” she snapped back.

  It was one less worry of his, but it placed him in a new dilemma. If he got himself killed, she would be by herself. The man would be none too happy his buddy was dead. Then again, the man in there might have a radio. If he was calling for help…

  He glanced at the girl. “Are you okay?” He smiled, trying to portray himself as a friend. A half-truth, at best.

  “I—I think so. They killed Tram.”

  “A bus?” He looked around, not sure what she meant.

  “No, my betrothed. He’s inside.” She pointed through the door.

  “There are more of them inside?” It would change the calculus of war if he was outnumbered again.

  “No. It’s just the one man. Tram is dead.”

  He felt his blood pressure come out of the upper atmosphere. One was doable. Two was trouble.

  “Stay out here. I’ll—”

  A small table crashed through the front window behind him. As Ted flinched to avoid the debris, the man in black hopped through the open gash. He held his pistol, firing it sideways like a gangster.

  One bullet cracked into the doorjamb next to Ted’s face. He was in the process of spinning around to meet the threat, but he decided to sidestep into the open front door. A few more shots belted out as broken glass splattered all over the front porch.

  Despite knowing precisely where the man was, he couldn’t risk popping back out through the door. As the seconds ticked off, he retreated into the cabin firing at the remaining glass of the front window in an effort to keep the man off balance.

  Three shots cracked as the guy remained somewhere on the porch between the window and the open door. They’d essentially switched places.

  “Kyla!” he shouted, hoping he could hear her through the side window.

  He expected her to fire at the bad man, but there were no shots coming in from her position. For a frightful second, he imagined the man had somehow run over to her and taken her down, but that was impossible. He hadn’t appeared in the window or door…

  “The middle,” he mumbled.

  He chanced moving to one side of the spacious front room of the cabin, which allowed him to see the man running straight out toward his SUV. He’d used the distraction of jumping and shooting to make a run for it.

  However, before he could even lift his rifle and line up a kill shot, Kyla finally got in on the gun battle. The pop-pop blasts of rifle fire resonated in the woods, and rounds plinked off the metal of the red car as the man ran past it. By the time he had his own shot, Kyla managed to tag the guy. When he fell to the ground at the side of his SUV, she zeroed in on him and put two more bullets into his prone body.

  Then there was nothing but silence.

  After a suitable pause, he went to the side window, choosing to yell out rather than look. “Kyla, you see any threats? I’m still in the cabin! It’s clear in here.”

  “Nothing out here,” she replied.

  “Be careful,” he answered back, mindful of how it didn’t really need to be said.

  A minute later, Kyla was inside the cabin with him. She went right to the kitchen, slid a chair next to the countertop, and then stood to get some height. She opened one of the cabinet doors and reached far back into the highest shelf. The tablet’s battery was still there.

  “I told you this would work out,” she gushed.

  “Yeah, thanks to you,” he said, proud of her.

  Leaving the kitchen, he noticed a man dressed in blue trousers and a tight blue shirt. He remembered what the girl had said about her betrothed. The man had been shot in the head.

  “Oh shit,” he whispered. “I don’t hear the girl!”

  They went out the door and found the young woman in blue lying in the yard near the red car. His gut tightened as he saw her condition.

  “Kyla, get some towels!”

  She worked inside while he confirmed both shooters were dead in front of the house. By the time he circled back to the youngster, Kyla handed him a small pile of bath towels. He crouched next to the injured girl, but even as he placed a towel over her chest to staunch the bleeding, he knew it was futile. One glance at the bloody pool around her said she wasn’t going to make it. It wasn’t as if he had the option of dialing 9-1-1, either.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, after locking eyes with the girl.

  “They killed him,” she moaned. “David said we had to come out here and inherit his new earth. He chased us out after the attack yesterday. Said we were months ahead of schedule. But why did his own men kill my Tram? Why did those same men wish to do me harm? This is not the way David taught us.”

  He didn’t know the correct way to respond. Part of him had the mind to say, ‘I told you so,’ since listening to the words of an imposter like David was guaranteed to end in failure. But part of him felt bad for the girl. She’d obviously lived a sheltered life. Had no context for the evils of men like the two shooters. Men who were also sent by David to do other forms of dirty work, such as destroying power plants. Those men didn’t see a pair of pioneers setting out on an Adam-and-Eve quest to rebuild a society. They saw a pair of defenseless kids, one of whom had the misfortune of being a pretty girl. She would not understand what drove such men to evil. Even he couldn’t say what did.

&
nbsp; So, he said the only thing that might help. He held her hand, hoping to comfort her. “You close your eyes now. Imagine yourself holding Tram again. I’m sure he’s waiting to hold you, too.”

  The girl smiled through the pain.

  “I see him.”

  It was the last thing she said.

  Cheyenne Mountain Western Exit, CO

  Tabby was as surprised as she’d ever been in her life. Audrey and Peter had managed to knock down all three of the men who had come to take her and Dwight back to the campground.

  “Where were you guys?” she asked with shock.

  “Just a second,” Peter cried out as he and Audrey jogged by. They held rifles at the ready as they went and checked the bodies. Only after making their rounds and looking toward the dirt path to see if anyone else was out there, did they finally come back to her.

  “What the heck happened to you two? Did I miss a training program?” She was still surprised, even a minute later.

  Audrey reached her first, taking her into an insta-hug.

  “We learned from you,” the girl replied.

  She was surprised again, but the human interaction was wonderful. After spending so much time with the distant Dwight, it was nice to make contact with a person. “Thank you for saving us, but where is everyone else?”

  “Gone,” Peter said dryly.

  “Like, all of them?” she asked.

  “Yep,” Audrey said, stepping back from her. “But he and I knew you’d come back, so we dumped everyone else when they hiked out of here. Peter took good care of me last night as we waited for you. It was hardly any trouble at all.”

  He laughed a little. “Actually, I don’t know a thing about the outdoors. I made her sleep on some sticks and pinecones. We haven’t eaten, either.”

  Audrey didn’t seem upset. “He tried. That’s what matters most to me.”

  The couple held hands, then got closer to her. Audrey whispered, while motioning toward Dwight. “What’s his deal. He looks like I did when I found out my parents were dead.”

  Tabby sighed. “That’s not far from the truth. You saw him yesterday, right? He had his giant bird with him. Well, those guys who captured us thought it would be funny to use his bird as target practice. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the gunfire. It was like a whole army shooting at the poor thing.”