Survival Rules Series (Book 2): Rules of Conflict

by Hunt, Jack

  “Well at least they untied our wrists and ankles.”

  “Oh, wonderful. Why don’t we give them praise that we are still alive?”

  Nate pulled a face. “Now that you mention it…”

  She pointed at him. “Don’t.”

  He chuckled and stood up stretching out his back and readjusting his nutsack.

  Nate had been out cold. By the time he opened his eyes they were already in the room. “How long have we been in here?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Two hours, maybe longer. Like I said, I blacked out.”

  “Well I’m sure we’ll be out of here in no time.” He said, leaning against the wall. “You heard what she said. They want to use us for leverage. Probably to get some of Corey’s supplies. No doubt that’s where they are now.”

  “Where?” Erika asked.

  “The hospital. She’ll ask for supplies in exchange for us, and boom, we’ll be out of here.”

  Erika snorted. “Corey doesn’t know us. You honestly think he’ll do some exchange? Please.”

  “But Tyler does, and he might not get along with his old man but him and Corey seem tight.”

  “Tight? If you can call bickering tight. No, we are screwed. We are on our own and it’s up to us to get out of here. No one is coming.” Erika went back over to the door and examined the hinges. “If we had something thin, maybe we could—”

  “Erika, sit down. I’m not going all A-Team on this sucker.”

  “A-Team?”

  “A show from the ’80s.” He waved her off. “Forget it.”

  She made her way back over and hopped up onto the top bed and let out a large sigh. “Maybe you’re right. Perhaps it’s pointless. All I can I think about is Bailey.”

  “You think she killed her?”

  “I heard her squeal.” Erika banged her fist against the wall. “If they killed her, I’m going to kill every one of them.”

  “Said like a true dog owner,” he said from below. “I wonder what Tyler will do when he finds us gone.”

  Erika sniffed hard. “Probably thinks we left town.”

  “Yeah. You know, I’ve got to give the guy credit. I’m not sure I would invite complete strangers back to my town.” Nate paused. “Tell me something. Was the date you went on with him really bad?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “On a scale of 1 to 10?”

  “I’m not rating it.”

  “Ah so it was a 10.”

  “Nate. Drop it. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Sorry, just trying to make small talk.”

  There was silence for a few minutes and then he started whistling.

  “Nate.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Geesh. Are you sure you weren’t partly to blame for the date being bad?”

  Erika rolled and hung down looking at him, her long hair flowing down. She was just about to rip into him when the locks on the door clunked into place and it opened. She was quick to swing her legs off the bed and jump down. “About time.”

  When the door opened, Zara was aiming a rifle at her while her brother came in with a tray. On it were two bowls of soup, a couple chunks of bread and a plate of crackers. “Chicken soup.”

  He placed it on the floor.

  “You think I can use the toilet? I’ve been asking to go for the past hour.”

  “All right but you try anything and I will drill a hole in your head,” the teen girl said.

  “You have some serious anger issues,” Erika said as she followed them out. The door was closed behind her and she got her first glimpse of where they were. She was standing in a narrow corridor, the floors had linoleum and up ahead looked to be a living room with sofas and chairs. She could hear gospel music playing and someone singing as they led her across the living room area. There were no windows or curtains which struck her as odd.

  “Here you go,” Jesse said, pointing to a small cramped room where there was only enough space for a person to step inside and turn around. She brushed past him and closed the door. Sitting on the toilet she looked around. Again, no windows. After, she flushed the toilet and it worked. That also struck her as strange being as the water at Corey’s had stopped, and they had to use a bucket to flush.

  “Hurry up in there,” Zara said banging on the door.

  “I’ll be right out.”

  A couple of seconds later she emerged and they led her back to the room. On the way back, she tried to soak in as much as she could to at least get the lay of the land but they moved her so quickly that she only saw two other rooms, one was the kitchen where that bitch Denise was busy cooking up a storm, and the other looked like it was being used for a storage room for the generator. There were several steel gallon canisters inside. Before she entered, she asked them straight out. “Where am I?”

  “Safe,” Jesse said eyeing her up and down with a look of interest.

  “Get in.” Zara didn’t seem as friendly as she shoved her back into the room where Nate was sitting and scooping a spoonful of soup into his trap. As the door closed behind her, she heard Zara chewing Jesse out about saying anything to her. They obviously wanted to keep it a secret.

  “This soup isn’t bad,” Nate said.

  She turned and looked at it. As much as she wanted to throw it against the wall and protest, she was hungry and that trumped throwing a hissy fit. She sat beside him and took a bite out of the bread and then a mouthful of the soup. He was right.

  “So what did you see?” He asked.

  “Not much. There are no windows.”

  “Curtains?”

  “None.”

  “Ah, then we are in a bunker.”

  “What?”

  Without getting up he banged his fist against the side. “An underground bunker. I was talking to Corey about his old man’s cabin. He was telling me how he’d developed this huge bunker underground. That’s how they make these things. Reinforced steel, concrete, they probably have an air filtration system. You don’t get windows down below. And people don’t generally live inside steel enclosures.” He swallowed his food. “Did you have to use a hand pump on the toilet?”

  “No, it just flushed.”

  “Gravity fed. Yep. We’re in a bunker.”

  “Great. Well what else did Corey tell you about the bunker?” Erika asked.

  “A lot of them are sold online. He had some engineer install it.”

  “I don’t care where they come from, Nate. How do we get out?”

  “There’s the main entrance, which is usually locked airtight, then you have an escape hatch but it doesn’t mean squat if we can’t get out of this damn room.”

  Erika nodded slowly and brought some bread up to her mouth, thinking about Jesse. “I think I might know how. Leave that to me.”

  Tyler’s ass was beginning to hurt as he veered the horse onto the patch of land leading up to Meadow Lake. He was now deep in God’s country, nothing but sprawling wilderness around him, dense greenery and streams for miles and miles. A flock of birds broke away and soared overhead in the brooding gray sky. The horse galloped across the dirt road. He glanced back and saw Bailey, slightly falling behind. Her tongue was out and panting hard. Tyler tugged on the reins. “Whoa, girl,” he said leaning close to the horse’s neck and rubbing the mane. He dismounted close to a stream that fed into the lake and brought the horse near to it to drink. Bailey rushed and went head-first into it, bounding around a few times to get herself soaked before shaking off and then drinking.

  “Crazy dog.”

  Once the horse had water, he tied off the reins on a tree branch.

  Tyler then pulled off his bag, and retrieved a life straw that would filter any water he wanted to drink. Although the water in the lake was probably good, he wasn’t taking any chances. He removed the cap and placed it in the water for a couple of seconds so the water would rise up through it. He bent down and began to drink through the straw.

  He gazed around at the rich
vegetation and listened to the sound of the wilderness. It felt good to be outside. That was the one thing he’d missed while in Vegas. The desert was beautiful but there was nothing like Montana.

  With no vehicles in operation he could hear every sound of the forest.

  Bailey trotted out of the water and shook again, sending drops of water everywhere. “Thank you for the shower, girl,” he said sarcastically. She got close and licked his face. He returned to drinking, and was in the middle of sipping when he heard the sound of guns cocking, one after the other.

  As if the forest had come alive, all over the place figures rose up around him wearing military-style ghillie suits. Shotguns, rifles and pistols pointed at him.

  Slowly he lifted both hands.

  “I’m guessing Jude’s men?” he asked as a smile formed.

  11

  When the doctor told Corey he had a visitor, he expected to see his father, not Officer Dean Ferris of Flathead County Sheriff’s Department. They hadn’t seen one another since the night he took off with the truck and killed the inmates out by Lake McDonald. The door eased open and Corey adjusted his position in bed. He was told the earliest he could be out would be in approximately six days which meant being cooped up in the same place that Terry had died. It wasn’t comforting and he had every intention of leaving sooner.

  Ferris was still wearing that god-awful brown officer uniform.

  “Corey Ford.” He had a big grin on his face. “Karma is a bitch, isn’t it?”

  “So is that uniform,” Corey replied. “Seriously, Flathead County should ditch the brown, it really doesn’t do your eyes any justice.”

  “Wise ass.” He sniffed and looked around. “You know how many hours it took us to walk back to Glacier?”

  “I’m not sure, I’ve always driven the route.”

  He chuckled. “I have a good mind to put you in cuffs and take you down to county.”

  “C’mon, officer, I got the job done. Sure, it wasn’t your way but you can’t deny the results.”

  “Yes. The results. Funny enough, we didn’t know you had killed five men as you didn’t come and tell us. In fact, we found out from a local resident who lived in the area and heard the gunfire,” he said, then let out an exasperated sigh while resting his hands on his duty belt. “So there was us searching the highways and byways, knocking on doors until the early hours of the morning under the impression they were still out there.”

  “Yeah, I kind of got busy.”

  “Busy as in… taking your vehicle home?”

  Corey smiled for a brief moment and then grimaced in pain. They had him on some serious meds but they weren’t having the hoped-for effect. “Something like that. Except I had to bury two friends that night.”

  His eyes widened. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well at least you’ll be pleased to know your problem is over.”

  Ferris took a seat and removed his cap before brushing dust off it. “I think our problems are far from over.” He breathed in deeply. “Heard things got a little hot down here.”

  Corey’s brow furrowed. “Terry is dead.”

  “And how did you wind up in here?”

  He brought him up to speed on all that had occurred, the knifing, the shooting at Terry’s home. “I’m not sure who it was, it was dark but it could have been anyone.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Corey frowned.

  “The night you headed back to Whitefish, two officers at our northern checkpoint were killed. One of them didn’t die immediately. He captured this on his body camera.” Ferris took out a cell phone. “I transferred the recording onto my phone.” Ferris pressed a button and showed it to him. Corey took it and watched as a white truck approached the blockade. One of the officers went through their usual routine of asking the driver questions while the second went around to the back to investigate what kind of load they had. Then all hell broke loose. What appeared to be a tarp exploded upwards and men with rifles unloaded round after round taking down both of them.

  “I’m hit. Officer down,” one of them said hitting the ground and trying to crawl towards the tree line for cover. As he turned over exchanging gunfire, the camera caught sight of the exact same person that Corey had killed that night, except he was wearing different clothing — the exact same clothing he’d seen on him at the cabin prior to Noah’s death. He remembered it struck him as odd why the man he killed was wearing different clothing but because he looked identical, he just assumed the inmate had changed clothes.

  “When was this taken?”

  “The time and date stamp is on there.”

  It was small and in the lower corner, barely noticeable. The timing was after he’d killed the inmates. He played the recording back again, this time looking at the men that were with the one who’d introduced himself at the cabin as the owner. He heard someone say, “Gabriel, let’s go.”

  In the video he saw another inmate pull on the shoulder of the identical man, who was hovering over the dead officer and fishing through his pockets.

  “Gabriel?” Corey muttered.

  “The only name we’ve got so far,” he said. “Over the past few days I’ve been trying to get hold of anyone in the prison system but with communication down, there are only a few frequencies that are in operation on the ham radio. We still don’t know how many inmates escaped as they probably split up, but judging by that video there are still at least six out there, and one correctional officer.”

  “A correctional officer?”

  His eyes must have missed it because he was so focused on the man he thought he’d killed. Ferris leaned forward and took back the video a little and pointed him out in the passenger side. “You can’t see it too well on this but when we had it on a computer I zoomed in and could see a shoulder patch for North Dakota’s State Penitentiary.”

  “So you think they’ve taken one hostage?”

  “Either that or one of them changed into the uniform. My guess is you don’t have much time to do that when a plane is going down. But I could be wrong. Criminals are resourceful.”

  Corey stared at the phone in disbelief, his stomach churned within him. “It was his brother.”

  “What?”

  “I shot a man who looked exactly like him,” he said pointing to the individual on camera. “I thought he was the same guy from the cabin. The one where Noah was murdered. He was wearing these clothes.”

  “The man you killed?”

  He shook his head. “No. The guy at the cabin. Did you not head over to the site of where the five men were killed?”

  “What would have been the point? A resident told us he found five bodies in the woods, and one of them was still wearing an inmate’s jumpsuit. I put two and two together. Your disappearance and their deaths, and figured you were behind it.”

  “And how did you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t actually. One of our officers had to be taken here because the overflow at the hospital in Kalispell is too great.”

  Corey couldn’t believe it. “The hospital is full? But it’s way bigger than this place.”

  Kalispell was just under twenty minutes south, the population there was three times the size of Whitefish. He’d imagined if any place would have thrived, it would have been there where the resources, supplies and volunteers were more bountiful.

  Ferris cocked his head. “Small communities seem to have fared better. I guess people know one another more and tend to rally together. Kalispell not so much. I see Whitefish has suffered some serious fires, but Kalispell is in a mess. You wouldn’t recognize it. Six days, that’s all it took to turn the damn place on its head. Looting is what started it. One act of desperation and greed.” He shook his head. “It’s like tipping a domino. It only takes one for the rest to fall. I thought our community was stronger than that.”

  Corey handed the phone back. “Survival can bring out the worst in people.”

  “And yet Whitefish seems to still
be hanging in there.”

  “Yeah. It’s surprising really. Still, I think those fires were purposely set as a distraction.” He nodded thoughtfully. “It makes sense now.”

  “You just thought Terry’s death was random?”

  “I don’t know what I thought. I certainly didn’t think this guy had an identical brother. I thought it was over and that only one of them had got…” His mind went back to hearing the name Hauser, and the words Come back here.

  “Got?”

  “Got away,” Corey said. “Ah man. He must have met up with them and…”

  “Sir, you can’t go in there. He has a visitor,” a nurse said from outside.

  Ferris cast a glance over his shoulder as the door burst open and Corey’s father barged in. “Corey, tell this nurse to back off.”

  “All right, calm down,” Ferris said getting up and intervening. Being a cop was in his blood. Whitefish was part of Flathead County so it was still a part of his jurisdiction.

  “I’ll calm down when I’m good and ready.”

  “Dad. Please.”

  “Corey, did Tyler tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Your home has been trashed.”

  He bolted upright in bed and then groaned in agony, gripping his shoulder. “What?”

  “It’s trashed. Windows, furniture, walls, you name it. It’s wrecked.”

  “Ella?”

  “She’s fine. She’s at the cabin.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief. Ferris looked at him. “It’s them.”

  Corey pulled back the covers and swung his legs off the edge of the bed. The nurse who was still standing by the door and scowling at his father rushed forward. “Hey, hey, Mr. Ford. You cannot be getting out of bed yet.”

  “Lady, there is nothing wrong with my legs.”

  “She’s right. Stay put,” Ferris said. “I’ll take a couple of officers up to your home and canvass the street and see if anyone saw or heard anything. Chances are they’re still here.”

  Corey shook his head and tried to get up but the nurse pushed him back down with the help of Ferris. “No, I’m going with you.”

  Ferris put up a hand. “You are in no condition to be out there.”