Bug Out

by G. Allen Mercer

  “So,” Grace treaded lightly. “What does that really mean? Why would Russia or China do this to us?”

  At that moment, the radio crackled and started receiving a broadcast from a one of Bob’s radio connections.

  “This is Dukes McCoy looking for contact. Over.”

  “Do you have a normal two-way radio I can use?” Grace asked Joshua as his father walked over to the radio to answer the call.

  “Sure,” he started walking and motioned for her to follow him outside. “I left it in my saddle pack. Come out with me to get it.”

  Grace followed Joshua outside, closing the door behind her as she heard Mr. Tiller key the mike to speak.

  “Hey Dukes, it’s Birmingham Bob, tell me the latest…”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ian had tried his two-way radio on channel 25 multiple of times. Channel 25 was the channel his family was supposed to be on during an emergency. He was confident that at least Leah or Grace had a working radio, but felt that even with the 100-mile range of the device Dukes gave him, there was too much interference.

  He checked his watch. They had been hiking for 7 hours and 45 minutes. He had another fifteen before he was scheduled to check in with Dukes via the two-way. They had agreed to check in every six hours. The communication between the two preppers served several purposes. For Dukes, he was accumulating intelligence about what was going on between his place and Birmingham. For Ian, it served as a base of operation, and as Dukes received information from his HAM radio buddies, he could pass it on to Ian.

  Their first communication at 4 hours after leaving was pretty vanilla. Ian and Mary had been successful at avoiding anyone and any form of civilization by following a set of railroad tracks leading to the northwest.

  “Please tell me there is a Hilton Hotel down there,” Mary said, as her head bobbed between her knees.

  She was sitting against a rock on a hill shrouded by oak trees. Ian was peering through the set of small binoculars at the dozen or so buildings of a small town. He wasn’t seeing any movement, but that didn’t mean there weren’t people.

  “That’s a negative, on the Hilton,” Ian said, never moving his eyes from the binoculars. He wouldn’t mind a Hilton, or at least a dry place to sleep for the night. He could see building clouds to the west and figured that they had about an hour before they would be pounded by a southern style thunderstorm.

  “Ian, I can’t go any further today,” Mary stated. She felt she had done a pretty good job at not bitching the entire day. She had even relented to carrying a loaded gun all day…that had to count for something!

  Ian didn’t say anything at first; he was tilting his head, listening to something else.

  “If you don’t care,” Mary said, “I’m going to take my boots off so that I…”

  “Shhh!” Ian looked back at her and nodded for her not to take her boots off, and to be quiet.

  She raised her arms as if to ask, ‘what?’

  Ian raised a finger. He was trying to localize the noise. He closed his eyes for a second to mentally run the sound against the database of sounds in his head.

  “What’s that?” Mary asked in a whisper. She now heard what Ian heard.

  Ian opened his eyes and looked at her. He simply said one word.

  “Drone.”

  Mary froze. She was paralyzed by what she should do. Should she run? Should she climb a tree? She started moving as if to get up.

  Ian sensed the panic and held his hand up to get her just to settle down. Which she did by sitting back down against the rock.

  “It’s OK,” he mouthed a time or two, before his eyes fixed on a point over her shoulder. He pulled the binoculars back up to his eyes.

  Mary turned to look at what had caught his attention. Down the hill and across a field two men emerged from a forest of oaks. They were wearing camouflage, which hid them if they were still, but they were anything but still. They were headed to the town, on the other side of the field.

  “How far away are they?” Mary asked, fear lacing her voice.

  “A little less than a mile,” Ian said, never taking his eyes from the binoculars.

  Ian watched the two men walk further into the field and then stop. They looked around, and then one of them pointed to the sky. They started running towards the town.

  “What are they doing?” Mary asked.

  “Running.”

  “I can see that, but why?”

  The men made it to the first building of the small town and hid behind a wall.

  “I…hold on…” Ian saw the muzzle blast before they heard the report of the two shots fired at the drone. “Idiots,” he said.

  Mary flinched at the noise. “What are they doing that for?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re about to get themselves killed if that’s a hostile drone.”

  “Why would it be hostile?” Mary’s only experience with drones was the drone footage shown on cable news. In one frame, you could see a car driving across a bridge and a targeting box aligning the car in the center of the frame. Usually, in the next scene, there was a streak and then the entire frame went white as the car exploded and the bridge collapsed.

  “Mary, we were nuked yesterday. We’re at war, on our on turf,” he said softly.

  The statement was said quietly, but seem to hit Mary like someone had just yelled it at her. ‘We’re at war on our on turf.’ Not since the Civil War has there been a real life active war on our own turf.

  Mary looked away from where the men hid next to the building and up to the sky. “Is it ours?”

  Ian was about to speculate when they saw the missile launch from the Drone streak towards the two men. They started running, but it was too late.

  “Holy Shit,” Mary observed.

  The missile hit the building and exploded the two story brick and wood structure. The building beside it also exploded and every glass front window along the street burst into billions of shards of shrapnel. The fireball threw one of the parked cars on the street into a tank of LP gas and that caused a massive secondary explosion that sent a shock wave past Mary and Ian.

  Mary put her hand to her mouth and looked back at Ian. Ian was frantically digging through his pack. Once he found what he was looking for he put the packaging to his teeth and ripped it open.

  Ian rapidly unfolded the thin silver Mylar survival blanket. The blanket looked more like lightweight tinfoil than it did a blanket.

  “Get under!” He pulled at her ankle to get her under the blanket with him.

  Once under, he pulled the sides down as tightly as possible.

  “Be still and don’t breathe!” he whispered.

  “Oh God.”

  “Shh.” Ian held his breath.

  The drone circled their area for five more minutes searching for more targets before it moved off.

  After a few minutes of not hearing the low humming noise, Ian slowly lifted the blanket off of them. They were instantly greeted with cool refreshing air.

  “Holy shit, Ian! What was that?”

  Ian looked at his watch and reached for the two-way radio.

  “Dukes, Ian, over.” He waited, and didn’t repeat the call.

  “Code?” the call came back in Dukes’ voice.

  “People,” Ian confirmed the code word for the hour that they had agreed on.

  “Going to make it short. Hunter Drones are actively removing targets. Entire small town destroyed. Over.”

  Ian knew that Dukes was thinking about what Ian was reporting.

  “Multiple chatter on the subject in the last two hours. First for your location. Over.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Mary asked.

  “It sounds like there are multiple drone attacks happening around us.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Aren’t they ours?”

  Ian shrugged and then keyed the microphone again. “Locations of reports? Over,” Ian asked.

  “Along a line from the Gulf Coast to Nashville to St. Louis
to Minneapolis.”

  Ian seemed to lose his reality as he heard the news and lowered himself back against one of the large oaks.

  “What does that mean?” Mary asked frantically.

  Ian didn’t answer. He simply stared out over the carnage of the burning town.

  “Ian!” she pushed his arm to get him to snap back into reality. “What does that mean?”

  “It means, that we’re being invaded.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Daisy had saved the lives of everyone. She did what her training had taught her to do. Leah stroked the head of her dog; she loved this dog.

  She then gently removed the vest that Daisy was wearing, careful not to injure her anymore than she already was. Daisy never whimpered. Her eyes looking at Leah’s the entire time.

  “It looks like this thing worked, girl,” Leah whispered to the dog. Daisy wagged twice, her tail thumping the floor and stopped.

  The vest was made of carbon fiber mesh, which was light enough for the dog, and still provided some layer of protection from objects such as knives and low caliber bullets and birdshot. The gun that the freaker had used to shoot Daisy with was a shotgun loaded with low grain birdshot. Since Daisy was so close to the end of the barrel when she was shot, the pellets had stayed mostly concentrated and hit the freeze-dried dog food pouch. The pellets that did not hit the pouch were knocked down by the bulletproof nature of the vest. Daisy most likely had bruised ribs, and was going to be okay.

  Satisfied that Amy, her children and Daisy were all okay, Leah now turned to the task of cleaning the gruesome scene from Amy’s kitchen.

  Leah and Amy moved the bodies out of Amy’s kitchen. They covered them in plastic and dragged them to the edge of Amy’s property along the woods.

  Amy and Rob had been piling brush and tree limbs in the area for years.

  “We should burn them,” Amy said, the tone in her voice flat.

  Leah agreed and found a can of lighter fluid to accelerate the lighting of the fire. They put the bodies on top of the pile as best as they could and Amy threw the match in to start the blaze.

  The fire caught quickly and grew in size to engulf the entire pile of brush, limbs and bodies.

  The size of the fire concerned Leah. She didn’t need to draw any more attention to their area, but seeing that there were other fires burning around the city, this one would just blend in.

  Even though this might be the case, she still walked to the front of the house a few times to look up and down the street, but there had been very little activity since yesterday, and there was none now, except for one person.

  “What are you girls burning?” Mr. Rivers asked as he peered over the hedge, looking at the fire.

  “Oh!” Amy was startled by the older man and jumped with nervousness.

  Mr. Rivers was easily the oldest person on their street. And the fact that he really didn’t have a place to go during the day had probably been the reason that he was home when the airplane hit downtown or the chaos erupted on the main roads. He was standing in the neighbor’s yard between his yard and Amy’s yard, talking to them over the row of boxwoods that ran the property line.

  “I saw the smoke,” he said.

  Leah was still wearing the Kel-Tec rifle; it was slung to her back, so she turned to face the elderly man hoping he had not seen the weapon. She really liked Mr. Rivers as a neighbor and friend. He always waved to her when she would jog with Daisy, and he grew the best tomatoes that she had ever tasted. He was the only other person on the street that displayed an American flag on his house besides Leah and Ian. The man was a Korean War veteran and never really spoke about it. He was a very proud man and had lived alone for the last ten years after his wife died. He was a retired defense lawyer and always did his best to ‘keep an eye’ on what was happening on the street.

  Leah was worried that the rapidly changing new society that was emerging in the aftermath of this tragedy would steamroll people like Mr. Rivers. This worry began to churn her stomach and test her will about executing the plan that she had with Ian. What am I going to do? She looked at Amy and then to Mr. Rivers. Her kids were sleeping on lounge chairs on the back deck, within sight and sound of their mother. What am I going to do? These were her friends and neighbors. How can I bug out and leave these people to die?

  Leah pushed the thoughts away and knew that she would have to face them sooner than later. She walked up to the boxwood hedge and to the curious eyes of Mr. Rivers. Amy went to tend to one of the children that woke up to the voices.

  The head of Mr. Rivers bobbed up and down slightly as he stood as straight as his elderly body would allow. He looked a little like a life size bobble head doll with his head constantly moving. Leah had learned to look past the ceaseless bobbing that plagued Mr. Rivers. It was nothing more than a twitch that the man had developed over the years. His eyes went from the large fire and then back to Leah’s face.

  Before she could say anything, he caught her off guard by speaking first.

  “You know,” his head bobbed a little more and his voice seemed to warble with the motion, “I’ve seen that look before.”

  Leah really didn’t know what he meant.

  “I don’t understand? What look?” She tried to deadpan her face as much as possible, but apparently it was something that couldn’t be hidden from a man that had seen the hells of a battlefield, and survived a long life after.

  “On your face, Leah,” he said, the curves of a worried smile etched on his face.

  She waited for him to continue.

  “It’s the same look that I know I had on my face the very first day I was in Korea.”

  Leah thought she knew what he was about to say. The water of tears rimmed her eyes. He knows what I did…what I had to do.

  “I saw it on the face of every new boy that joined us on the battlefields. It,” he paused for a second and cleared his throat. “It’s a look of pain. A look of question. A look of duty. That’s the look that is on your face, girl.”

  A tear rolled over Leah’s cheek.

  “Leah, don’t be ashamed of what you had to do,” he simply said.

  She nodded, and moved the tears away from her eyes. They both watched the fire burn for several quiet moments.

  “I saw them,” he said, leaning his bobbing head towards the fire. “I saw them when they walked down the street. I knew their kind.” He waved a tan wrinkly hand towards the fire. “As a soldier, a cop and then a defense lawyer, you just learn their kind. You know what they’re capable of and you know that it only takes a spark to light their powder keg.”

  “I call them freakers,” Leah said, her voice low and quiet.

  “That’s a good name,” he agreed. “You know in Korea, when we wanted to take some hill or start a campaign, we came in and destroyed what we could by bombing the hell out of it, and then we put boots on the ground to do the rest.”

  Leah nodded, listened to the old man.

  “The ones that were left. The ones that survived our bombs would always put up one hell of a fight.” He turned from the fire and looked at Leah. “I can see that the same thing is true here today.”

  She didn’t know exactly what to say. He was telling her something from a perspective of experience, but she didn’t quite know what it was.

  “You did a good thing, Leah.”

  She half smiled.

  “It never gets easier,” he simply said.

  “What will never get easier, Mr. Rivers?”

  “Killing people. It never gets easier. But,” he pointed an elderly finger at her. “I’ll say it again, you did a good thing. We can’t let the world be ruled by people like that, or who ever is trying to take us.”

  “Take us?”

  “Leah,” he said, adopting his lawyer voice. “It’s very plain to see that what’s happening is not some isolated event. This is the first stage of a campaign; just like we did in Korea. Someone else sees our country as the hill they want to take. They’re coming, Leah; mark m
y word. But, with folks like you, I know they’re going to run into one hell of a fight!”

  The idea of an invading force coming into America was not one of the scenarios that she and Ian had planned for. Terrorist strike. They cause terror; they don’t invade a country… That’s what other countries do. Realization struck her hard. This really is our worst case scenario. I need to find Grace.

  “Mr. Rivers, are you armed in case we have more trouble; or something larger happens?”

  The man smiled and turned to walk back to his house. “Don’t you worry about this old man, my dear. If your,” he paused and bobbed his head a few times back towards the fire, “Freakers, want to mess with an old man, well, like you just proved, it might be the last thing they do. If it’s something larger, well, we’ll just have to fight like hell. Won’t we?” He winking at her and started walking home.

  She watched him walk away, and heard a familiar voice on her two-way radio.

  CHAPTER 8

  Grace walked with Joshua into the stables. It had been several years since she had been in a horse barn. The smell and the sounds of the horses in their stalls brought back warm childhood memories of when she used to ride as a girl.

  “Do you like horses?” Joshua asked.

  “I love horses,” she said, smiling at the first horse that stuck its head out of the stall to look at them.

  “That’s Mickey.”

  Grace walked up to the horse. He had a white strip up his forehead with two white splotches at the top of the stripe. “His stripe looks like…”

  “Mouse ears. Yeah, that why we call him Mickey.”

  “Hey boy,” she said, and gently put her hand on Mickey’s forehead. The horse was warm and nuzzled her hand.

  “We’ve had him for awhile.” Joshua patted Mickey on the neck. “He’s got a great temperament.” He moved onto the stall next to Mickey’s and whistled gently.