He was moving along slowly at four miles an hour and virtually silent. And he was closely watching the landscape ahead of him.
But Scott wasn’t a warrior by nature, and was a rookie when it came to urban warfare or guerilla tactics. He made a dreadful error. He wasn’t watching behind him.
He’d seen the two cars, sitting side by side alongside the roadway. They’d been there for awhile, with flat tires and broken windshields and graffiti spray painted on the sides.
When he and Tom had driven the Walmart truck down the mountain a few weeks before, the cars had been there then. They caused some concern, but once they passed them by they ceased to be of interest.
When Scott came down the mountain at full speed several hours before, he paid them less attention. He remembered them from the first trip and no longer considered them a potential threat.
And now, on his way back up the mountain, they were little more than a landmark.
But they were more than just a landmark to the four men hiding behind them.
The four men had seen Scott come speeding by an hour and a half before, but who were caught off guard and couldn’t stop him until Scott was long gone.
The same four men had correctly reasoned that whatever goes up must come down. And that whoever drives past going in one direction is likely to return in the opposite direction.
So they hid behind the abandoned cars and waited.
And sure enough, Scott came creeping toward them, staring more or less straight ahead.
The group of men could have stood up and fired upon him then.
But they didn’t. They were cowards and back shooters. So as Scott slowly approached their position from the south, they crawled to the east side of the abandoned cars, then around the cars to come out behind him.
It was only then that one of them leveled an AK-47 in Scott’s direction and pulled the trigger.
The bullet entered Scott’s upper back, halfway between his spine and shoulder socket. It made a small hole in his back, passed completely through his shoulder blade, and exited through a larger hole in his upper left chest.
Had the shot not caught him completely off guard, he would have likely floored the accelerator and tried to outrun his attackers.
But getting shot from behind was the last thing that Scott had expected. He’d made a potentially fatal mistake by failing to consider all possible scenarios.
He’d let his guard down, and it had cost him.
He’d been too relaxed when the bullet struck. Too limber. And the sheer force of the bullet forced his body off balance. Only his left hand had been on the steering wheel, and it was immediately knocked free. He twisted off the side of the Gator and tumbled to the ground.
Before he even hit the ground he knew he’d made a terrible mistake.
But now it was too late.
Scott lay on the pavement, holding his shoulder with his right hand and writhing in pain.
His assailants, on the other hand, whooped and hollered for joy. The wheeler continued to creep forward at four miles an hour, not knowing or caring that its operator had been quite literally shot off of it.
One of the men ran the machine down and jumped aboard, then turned it around and drove it back. The others were busy back slapping and high fiving each other.
Scott reached for his handgun and was kicked soundly in the face with a hard leather boot. He instantly felt his front teeth loosen and tasted the leaden taste of his own blood.
“Try that again, you son of a bitch, and I’ll shoot you through the head this time.”
-2-
Scott had always considered himself a very lucky man. And now he was cursing himself. Because of his own stupidity, his luck had finally run out.
The pain was almost unbearable, and he fought hard to keep from passing out.
“So, where’d you get this fancy little machine here, Buddy?”
Scott didn’t answer.
“What’s the matter, mister? Cat got your tongue, does it?”
One of the other men laughed.
“No, I think my size twelve got some of his teeth, that’s what I think happened.”
“You don’t mind if we take your machine for a little spin, now do you? We promise we’ll bring it right back. You just wait right here and we’ll be back in five minutes. You have my word on that.”
“Get up, you son of a bitch.”
Scott felt himself being pulled up by his shirt collar. Someone took off the web belt he had around his waist, and ripped the night vision goggles from his face.
Then they shoved him into the dirt by the side of the road.
They struck Scott as rednecks, from their language and demeanor. Scott had nothing against rednecks. He’d considered several of them his friends, back in the old days. As a group, they weren’t a bad lot.
The problem was, once a redneck made up his mind about something, he seldom changed it. And that worried Scott.
“What do you think we should do with him, Joe?”
“I say let’s just shoot the son of a bitch and be done with it.”
“I don’t know. I’m down to my last few bullets. Don’t want to waste another one on this scumbag. He’ll bleed to death soon enough from his first wound. You’re getting careless in your old age, Davey. Used to, you’d have blown him away instead of just wounding him.”
“Please,” Scott pleaded. “You’ve got my vehicle. Killing me won’t get you anything else, or help you any more. Just leave me to die in peace.”
“Maybe we should just beat him to death. How about it, Joe?”
“Nah. He’s right. It makes no sense to waste any more effort on a man who’s just gonna die anyway. Let’s get the hell out of here before that gunshot attracts anybody else.”
Scott lay in the dirt, trying to come to grips with the pain. But his mind overruled him. The human mind, in its mercy, shuts down when the physical pain becomes too great for one to bear.
The last thing Scott heard before he blacked out was the sound of his Gator driving off in the distance.
He came to sometime later, but he didn’t have a clue what time it was. He was fairly good about guessing the time of day by looking at the position of the sun.
Nighttime, though, was a different story.
It was still dark. And the moon had changed position in the sky. But he wasn’t sure whether he’d been out for five minutes or five hours.
His assailants were long gone. Probably thought he died when he passed out. Or maybe they just wanted him to suffer a slow and agonizing death.
He felt his wound. It wasn’t bleeding profusely. It was more a heavy ooze. But he’d lost enough blood to soak his shirt. And that worried him.
He lay there for a minute, trying to regain his senses. Things were foggy, and although the pain wasn’t as great as before, he knew he had to control it. If he passed out a second time, he might bleed out without ever waking up again.
He’d passed out lying on his right side, his head slumped down to the pavement. The wound, on the left side of his body, had been elevated, above the heart. He never had any medical training, and certainly didn’t know much about trauma to the body, but he wondered if the position his body was in when he passed out saved his life. That if he had fallen the other way, if the wound was beneath him, would he have bled to death?
He shook his head, trying to get back on track. Whatever happened or didn’t happen up to this point no longer mattered.
What mattered now was that he was still alive, but that he was in a world of hurt. And only he could save himself. There was no 911 to call, no ambulance to pick him up. He had a choice. He could lay here and die, or he could drag himself to safety.
Wherever the hell that was.
He stumbled slowly to his feet. He couldn’t risk rising too fast and passing out a second time. He might not wake up again.
At least the pain wasn’t as severe as before. Mother Nature’s way of having mercy on him, he supposed. Oh, it still
hurt like hell. But either it had become tolerable or his mind had adjusted to it.
He thought back to the old movies he’d seen where macho actors like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood got shot and then sloughed it off, like it was nothing.
Screw them. Getting shot hurt, and it sucked big time.
He couldn’t go north. He knew that he was more than eighty miles from the compound. And although the grade was gradual, it was uphill all the way. At best he might manage a couple of miles a day. That was just too far to go, and too long to get there. Even if he hadn’t been shot it would be an ordeal. Now it was an impossibility.
He reached his right hand to the exit wound on his left shoulder. The blood was seeping slowly. It was starting to clot. He doubted it would stop completely on its own, and he debated whether or not to rip a piece from his shirt tail to shove into the hole. Then he decided not to. At least not now. If his being upright and walking around made the bleeding worse, it would be an option. But he didn’t want to restart the heavy bleeding again if he could help it.
The exit wound was as big as his thumb. He was lucky, he knew. Going through his shoulder blade the way it did the bullet could have send jagged pieces of bone in front of it, and ripped a gaping hole in his chest. He decided he was lucky to be alive. And he hoped to stay that way for awhile.
He headed south, toward his old house, but off the roadway. In case his attackers came back by to finish the job or to see if he’d died yet, be wanted to be in the brush where they couldn’t find him.
On his way down the mountain, he’d cursed the partial moon in the night sky. Now, without the night vision goggles, he was glad to have it. It gave him just enough light to see a few yards ahead of him, so he could go around the heavy shrubs and mesquite trees, instead of plowing headlong into them.
To his left, forty yards away, was a row of suburban houses, blackened for months by the power outage. Something seemed eerie about them, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. They seemed somehow out of place, like from another world.
Then it dawned on him, it was their stillness. There was no sound of people conversing. No dogs barking. Nothing. They were little more than props. No longer containers of life and joy. Nothing but cold walls and reminders of a better time.
He suspected the dogs had starved to death in the days and weeks following the blackout. Or put out of their misery by compassionate owners. And many, he supposed, were probably eaten as the survivors became more and more desperate for food.
Scott wondered how many of the houses had become tombs. John had told him that hundreds of thousands of people took their own lives in the privacy of their homes rather than deal with an inevitable, harsher fate. He said entire families were gassing themselves to death in their garages, or taking poison together and dying in one another’s arms. In many cases, fathers were shooting their entire families, and then turning the guns on themselves.
He said he knew of cases where families had no means to kill themselves, and went into neighbors’ houses after the shooting stopped. So they could retrieve the weapons and show their own families the same mercy.
That’s where the plague had come from, John told him. From all the decaying bodies hidden in the houses. The flies found them. And the mosquitoes tried to feed off them. And it was the insects that spread the plague to the masses.
It was like kicking a man when he was down. The survivors had endured so much already, and then the plague came to decimate the city even more.
Step by step, foot by foot, Scott stumbled into the darkness. He wasn’t sure how far he had to go. The two hundred foot towers carrying the power lines overhead were each numbered. They were painted with reflective white paint which were easy to see with night vision goggles. But with just the moonlight, they were impossible to make out from fifty yards away. He could go closer, but he’d be exposed to his attackers if they happened to come back. And as slow as he was moving, he likely wouldn’t have time to make it back to the brush after he heard their vehicle.
He caught himself. It wasn’t their vehicle, damnit. It was his, and they were sons of bitches for taking it.
No, going back under the towers wasn’t an option. He’d stay in the brush, plodding slowly along, watching the shape of the darkened houses until they started looking familiar to him.
-3-
Scott felt the sensation of being light headed and dizzy. He felt his wound. It didn’t appear to have started bleeding again. He couldn’t reach the entry wound, but he could tell by the way his bloody shirt stuck to his back how much blood he’d lost. And the blood spot didn’t appear to be getting any larger.
He guessed that it was a combination of blood loss and dehydration that was causing his light headedness, and hoped he’d be able to make it to his old house.
That was his last thought before passing out a second time.
This time he came around to the sensation of something crawling across his face. He felt a searing pain across his back, as though he were being burned with a hot poker. He arose, still dazed and confused, and was horrified to find that he was covered with fire ants. And the worst part was, he was too weak to brush them off.
He endured their stinging while he tried to regain his senses. For a couple of moments he couldn’t even remember being shot. Or where he was. He wondered how in hell he came to be lying in the dirt, near an ant bed, in the middle of nowhere.
Slowly, it all came back to him. In a fog, he looked around for the men who’d done this to him. But there was no one around. He managed to roll over, and the sun burned his eyes. It was directly overhead now. Noon or very close to it, he guessed.
It took a monumental effort to prop himself upon one knee, and another to stand. The ants continued to sting him until they fell off one by one. Oddly enough, it was the only pain he felt. The bullet wound had turned from the sharp pain it was the night before to something else. Something akin to numbness.
His vision was foggy. His eyelids dragged slowly across his eyeballs. He knew he was dehydrated. Perhaps that was why the bleeding stopped. Perhaps it was too thick to flow.
He tried to focus on the high tower to his right. To make out the number on it. 14545.
Damn it. In his confusion, he’d come too far. He’d passed by the sanctuary of his home. He’d spent a good portion of the night passed out in the dirt and being devoured by an army of angry ants for no good reason.
His body wanted him to find a soft place in the grass to lie down and go to sleep. His mind half agreed, but also argued half-heartedly that to lay back down now would mean an almost certain death.
So he backtracked. Trudging slowly along, he retraced his steps for a quarter of a mile until the rooftops looked familiar.
He came to his back fence, and was disheartened to see that Robbie had replaced the section of fence he’d removed the night before when Scott dropped off the medicine. Now he had to figure out how he was going to get over a six foot privacy fence when he could barely stand up.
He finally reached up with both hands and placed them upon the top of one of the fence slats.
With all the strength he could muster, he pulled.
He was lucky in that the fence was several years old. The wood had softened a bit, and the two nails holding the slat to the top brace gave way a bit.
It wasn’t much. Maybe half an inch or so. But it was enough to give him a little more leverage the next time he pulled. And they came out a bit more then.
It took him four pulls to rip the first slat off the fence. And seven for the second.
He wasn’t sure he had the strength to pull a third slat off, but he didn’t need to. He was able to squeeze through the twelve and a half inch hole the two slats had given him.
He still wasn’t in his right mind.
At first, he was a little bit pissed that Robbie had left without securing the sliding door to his patio.
Then he realized that the house had almost certainly been looted of all its food, and pro
bably its valuables as well. And had the door been locked, he’d have used more of his rapidly diminishing strength breaking in.
He pulled a drinking glass from the cupboard and turned on his kitchen faucet. He knew the water was safe to drink. John had told him the water plant had managed to become partially operational again a couple of weeks before.
Still, as a precaution, and as thirsty as he was, he let it run for a full two minutes to flush the pipes before he filled his cup.
It dawned on him that of all the water he’d drank in his entire life, this was the best. And he didn’t stop until he drank two full glasses.
He looked around, and was surprised that most of his belongings were still there. Everything had been rifled through. The kitchen drawers had been dumped on the floor and most of the things in the cupboard had been angrily tossed aside. But there didn’t appear to be anything missing.
He stumbled over to the couch, with the intent of laying there for just a few moments.
When he woke up again, it was completely dark.
-4-
Scott’s loved ones at the compound were frantic. Scott’s plans were to drop off the medicine around midnight. That would have given him around five hours or so of darkness, to cover his journey back up the mountain.
Joyce had tried to sleep, but tossed and turned all night. She didn’t share the same sense of foreboding that Scott had. Her discomfort was caused more by the mere fact that the man she loved was out there, all alone, on a dangerous mission. And if anything did go wrong, there was very little she or anyone else could do to help him.
At three a.m. she finally got up and went to the security console. Linda, Scott’s ex-wife, was pulling her normal shift, watching the monitors for any sign of his vehicle.
Under the best case scenario, he’d be coming into view on the tower’s south facing camera any minute.
Linda said, “I’ve been trying to raise him on the radio every ten or fifteen minutes for the last hour. I haven’t heard as much as a peep. And you, honey, look like hell. Did you get any sleep at all?”
Rise From The Ashes: The Rebirth of San Antonio (Countdown to Armageddon Book 3) Page 2
