Bug Out

by G. Allen Mercer

  WORST CASE SCENARIO

  BUG OUT

  Book 2

  G. Allen Mercer

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 G. Allen Mercer

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording, or otherwise, except to quote on blogs or reviews without the expressed written permission of the author. Any unauthorized reproduction of this work is punishable by law. Permission can be requested at: www.GAllenMercer.com

  Cover design and text by G. Allen Mercer

  For those that dare to stand up

  against those that want to knock you down

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  The girls sat in Grace’s Jeep staring at the house. Grace had her 9mm pistol sitting on her lap with the safety on. She didn’t want to have to use the gun again; she had already shot two people in the last twelve hours.

  “What if he’s not who he says he is?” Anna asked. Her head was pounding from the blow she had taken to the face the night before. Her left eye and nose seemed to be one black and blue nebula of pain and ugliness.

  Grace thought about what Anna said. She had been thinking about it since the instant she had agreed to follow Joshua back to his family’s house.

  But what choice do I have? A nuclear bomb went off in Atlanta, an EMP has shut down everything, airplanes are falling from the sky, we lost the map, we lost the radio, I had to shoot two people and we’re lost! I had to shoot people…

  Grace shook her head clear. She had to stop thinking that way. If they were going to get back to her mom and survive, then it meant believing in everything her parents taught her and trusting a few people along the way.

  “Then we’ll deal with it, okay,” Grace answered Anna.

  “Oh, like you dealt with Mr. Miller and…” she regretted saying the words the instant they passed her lips, and she didn’t finish the sentence.

  Grace tightened the grip on the steering wheel and the knob of the manual gear shifter.

  “I’m so sorry, Grace. I shouldn’t have said that.” She looked at Grace through one half swollen eye and a nose that was double its regular size.

  Grace looked back and paused before speaking. “You really look like shit,” she said in complete deadpan. Both girls laughed until the door to the house opened.

  Joshua came through the door first, followed closely by an older man and a lady.

  “Here we go,” Grace whispered, and she thumbed the safety off on the pistol. The girls opened their doors at the same time and stepped out of the Jeep. Grace, once again, tucked the pistol in the small of her back before stepping around the half door of the Jeep.

  “Bob Tiller,” the man said, stepping around Joshua and extending his hand to Grace.

  Grace took the hand and shook. “I’m Grace, and this is Anna,” she responded, conveniently leaving off their last names.

  “This is my wife Violet,” the man said, with reference to the lady.

  “You look terrible, dear,” Violet said, making a beeline towards Anna with her hands ready to cup the girl’s face.

  Anna leaned back, but let the lady touch her face.

  “It’s okay,” Joshua said. “My Mom’s an ER nurse.”

  “Let me help you, dear,” Violet insisted, gently to Anna. “Come inside, I can take a better look at you there.”

  Anna looked to Grace for support. Grace nodded curtly. Anna and Violet moved towards the house, Violet had her arm around the girl’s shoulders.

  “Josh told me you two were in some trouble last night,” Bob stated, they were still standing in front of the Jeep.

  “Yes sir,” Grace answered. “Freakers.”

  “Freakers? What are freakers?”

  “They’re the ones that lose it right after a catastrophic event.”

  “You mean like an atomic bomb going off in Atlanta and Chicago and an EMP over the rest of the country?” Bob said, stopping the girl in mid thought.

  “What?” Grace whispered the word in disbelief.

  “Honey, we live on a farm. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know things. We’re pretty self supportive out here.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you come on in and have some breakfast. We lost most of our electrical things during the attack, but we can get by, and Violet makes some great pancakes.”

  “Yes sir,” she answered, catching the eye of Joshua staring at her before they turned for the house.

  Grace fell in behind the father and son and reached under the back of her shirt finding the pistol and thumbed the safety back on.

  CHAPTER 2

  Leah sat on the floor motionless for several minutes after she turned the two-way radio off. Her mind tried to process the horrific events that must have unfolded for her daughter to lose her map, lose her radio and to have shot someone.

  During that time, her eyes closed and her mind tormented her reality.

  She could see clearly the detail of what she was supposed to do in this situation. She could see the plan in her head. She could see the list and how she was supposed to follow it. She could see clearly what her husband was supposed to do when separated from the family. He was supposed to do whatever was necessary in order to get back to his family. She could see clearly that her daughter was doing what she had been trained to do and was shooting a man…

  Leah awoke to a jump. Daisy was next to her, sitting and alert to their surroundings.

  “How long was I out?” she asked the dog, trying to get her mind to focus. The stress of the events, the lack of sleep, and what was happening to her family were eating her up inside and playing tricks with her mind. She put her hands on the countertops and pulled herself up slowly.

  “I must have fallen asleep,” she said aloud, before checking her watch. It was 10:25 AM. “Jesus! Daisy, I’ve been out for almost five hours!”

  She turned the kitchen sink faucet on to splash water on her face, but the water didn’t flow. Instead, she was greeted to the gurgling air sounds of unpressurised water.

  “Shit!”

  Getting her wits about her, she turned the two-way radio back on and just listened as she found her bottle of water and poured some in her hand to splash on her face.

  There was no noise on channel 25, so she put the radio on scanning mode to search for any activity on any channel. She set the radio on the table, found her cold tea and slugged the entire cup.

  “Ok, Daisy, on me,” she said in a commanding voice to the dog.

  Daisy responded like a switch had been flipped. She stopped wagging her tail and moved to a position a few inches from Leah’s leg.

  “Good girl,” Leah praised. The command had effectively told the dog that there was work to be done. “Daisy, patrol,” she commanded.

  The dog immediately went to the front door and scanned the area. She followed the action with a scan out the back door and any other window that she could see out of.

  Daisy had been a gift from one of Leah and Ian’s friends who trained dogs for bomb service, police work and working with
the disabled. Ian had confided in the friend about his desire to get a family pet. He also wanted a dog so that he could add a layer of protection to the family when he traveled.

  Their friend, Lewis, had invited the family over to his kennel a few weeks after a new litter of Labradors had arrived. Grace fell apart for the runt of the litter, a black lab. She let it lick her face and tussled with it in the grass.

  “Of course she likes that one,” Ian said to Lewis as he looked at the much larger puppies and at some of the German Shepard dogs in a nearby pen.

  “The runts are often some of the smartest, but they’re never the ones taken for the serious jobs. If your family will come out and work with me to train her, that dog may be the best line of defense you ever add to your family,” Lewis suggested to Ian.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I’m telling you, with you all working with her, she will defend you to the end.”

  “Really?”

  “For sure! If you guys are onboard, she will be my gift to you, Leah and Grace.”

  < >

  Leah fought to focus. She opened the refrigerator; it was still cool. She plucked all of the eggs and threw them into a pot of water on the extra burner on the grill outside. She then went downstairs and gathered everything that was part of the plan for bugging out. She put them into three duffle bags and then checked her main pack for the essentials. Satisfied she was ready to go, she went back upstairs and moved the eggs inside and poured whatever ice she had in her freezer over them and put them in a freezer bag.

  “Daisy OK,” she commanded the dog, thus removing the dog from its last command. The dog’s demeanor shifted immediately and she became the family pet that she was most of the time. “Do you want breakfast before we leave?”

  The dog wagged and galloped to her bowl in the kitchen.

  Leah fed the dog and took the last of her supplies down to the garage. Once there, she looked at her dead SUV and sighed heavily. She loved that car.

  Instead, she turned to the other side of the garage and looked at a giant canvas covering something.

  “Please tell me you fixed the AC,” she said aloud as she pulled the cover off of Ian’s latest project car, and the family’s other bug out vehicle. “God, that’s ugly.”

  The 1979 Rover Defender 110 four door was arguably one of the first SUVs on the planet. This one was dark green with a luggage cage on top, a winch on the front bumper and a spare tire on the hood. Even though it was still in the process of being refurbished, Ian had it loaded with several weapons and gear to get out of town fast.

  “I hope this piece of crap starts,” Leah said, opening the rear door and throwing everything into the back. She retrieved the key from the safe room and opened the right side door of the English drive vehicle. It was at that point that she heard the radio come to life. She had left it on the kitchen counter upstairs.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ian watched Mary cross the road first. She kept low and scurried across like a squirrel. Just like he had taught her. He then scanned up and down the road one more time before crossing in a similar, but less squirrel-like manner.

  “Tell me again,” Mary asked, while brushing her bangs back behind her ear, “just why the Hell do we have to cross every road like that?”

  Ian really didn’t want to tell her why he did everything the way that he did them.

  “It helps keep us safe,” he offered, gruffly.

  “Really?” She watched him walk past her and into the woods. “What are you doing now?”

  Ian rounded on her. “Look Mary, I do the things the way I do them because it keeps me,” he paused, mentally checking his volume and his temper, “and you, alive. It’s like the airplane. We could have died, but we did some things that helped keep us from a watery grave. This trek is the same thing.”

  She nodded, feeling the push of tears at her eyes.

  Ian put his arm up to his face so that he could roll his eyes without her seeing. “Look. You need to trust me. Okay?” He gently put his hand on her shoulder and she fell against his chest, the sobs of loss hitting her hard.

  “Ohkaughw,” she said, into his shirt.

  “What?”

  She leaned back away from him. “Okay,” she said and then pulled her sleeve across her eyes to dry the tears.

  Ian looked at his watch; they had been walking about three hours. He then took another look up and down the road and was convinced that there was no one within sight.

  “Why don’t we take a break for a minute.” He moved them deeper into the woods and removed his pack. “Drink some water.”

  She did as told and sat down against a pine tree. “So, what are in these packs, anyway? Mine is freaking heavy.”

  “I have a good idea, but I wanted to put some distance between where we were and where we’re going. Sometimes it’s not nice to critique what is given to you freely. Especially in front of the person that just gave you the free gift.”

  “Dukes didn’t have to do that for us,” she said, taking another long swig of water. “He didn’t have to do anything for us, but he took us in, cleaned us up and sent us on our way with supplies that his family might need.”

  Ian stopped pulling items out of his pack and looked at her. “Preppers are different. We stash things that we think we’ll need for situations we hope we’re never in. It’s not really in our nature to give any of it away. But, thankfully, Dukes is a different person,” he paused, and then went back to unpacking his bag. “It might be more than I would have done in the same situation.”

  She watched him pull things from the bag and place them in some order of importance on the ground. “I don’t see that, Ian.”

  He didn’t answer, but kept itemizing the contents of the packs.

  “You saved me,” she pressed. “I don’t know why, but in the instant where you could have just saved yourself, you made the choice to save me, too.”

  Ian nodded. He felt a little uncomfortable with her calling him out on his emotional decisions.

  “So, yes. If the roles were reversed between you and Dukes, I think you would do the same thing. You would save us, send us on our way and never ask for payment.”

  “What did you do, I mean before all of this…for a living?” Ian tried to change the subject.

  “I was a lawyer.”

  “Oh shit! You mean the world is ending and I end up saving a lawyer!”

  She smiled, and realized that it was the first time she had smiled since taking off from Houston a day ago. She looked up at the greenness of the trees, trying to hold onto the happy thought.

  “You just made a joke!” she said, still looking at the pine tree limbs.

  “Sometimes my sarcasm can be misinterpreted as a joke,” he said flatly.

  “You just did it again,” she said, feeling a little better.

  Ian looked at her trying to keep the emotions down and decided that now, while she was smiling, was as good a time as any to introduce her to weapons.

  “Have you ever fired a weapon before?” he asked, bluntly.

  She looked down from the green trees and her smile melted into a frown. “If you mean shot a gun, like a pistol or something? No, I’m anti-gun.”

  Ian smiled. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  She shook her head. “No, Ian, I’m not. My firm handled a number of domestic violence cases involving guns and at least two or three 2nd Amendment challenge cases.”

  “Well,” Ian ran his hand over his head. He had trained a number of people on how to handle weapons, but never anyone that was opposed to a weapon. He pulled the Kel-Tec 9mm from the bag, unfolded the weapon, extended the carry strap and loaded a full clip of ammo. “I’m not going to make you shoot this weapon, but I want to show you how it works.”

  “But,” she protested.

  Ian held out his hand for her to stop talking, and she did.

  “You trust me, right?”

  She nodded affirmatively.

  “I trust you too, so,
what I’m about to tell you might end up saving your life or my life. Okay?”

  She looked at him for a second, her mind processing the reality of today versus her set of beliefs and those of her former life.

  “I don’t want to shoot that thing,” she said.

  “We’re not going to shoot anything, at least not around here,” Ian said. “We want to conserve every bullet and we also don’t want to give our position away by firing a weapon. So, just so we’re both safe as we move forward; please allow me to demonstrate how this gun works.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but Ian looked at her in a polite but persistent way; she closed her mouth.

  “This is for your safety and mine. When it comes to weapons such as pistols, rifles and shotguns, the more you know how they work, the safer you will be if you have to handle them. Does that make sense?”

  She nodded that it did.

  “Okay, once you feel comfortable with this,” he held out the rifle for her to take, “I would like for you to carry it the rest of the way.”

  Mary gingerly took the rifle, “Alright,” she said, to her own disbelief.

  CHAPTER 4

  Leah froze at the top of the stairs. The voice coming from the radio was the voice of the man she had heard earlier. The same man that had threated to find her home and that said that Grace or ‘Jeep bitch’, as he called her, had shot his brother.

  The voice on the radio started singing the words he had said earlier. “I’m coming to get you Jeep bitch. I’ve figured your map out. I know you have stuff that works. You shot my brother. I’m coming to get you Jeep bitch.”

  Leah picked up the radio and turned down the volume so that his voice was not as loud. She looked at the back door, it was locked, but it was also mostly made of glass. Any person with a heavy rock or a pick ax could get through the door…or any window.