Home Port (A Deep State, Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) (Long Haul Home Book 4)

by Dana Fraser

  He couldn’t know if it was the words, the sound of his voice or the rhythmic strokes, but she left the dream behind. Thomas waited a few minutes to make sure Becca had truly settled then he started on her hands again before moving on to her feet. By the time he was finished, Isaac had returned and dug up a thermometer.

  Thomas took a temperature reading.

  “One hundred and three point six degrees,” he said as Isaac took the device back and squinted at the display.

  “Better keep a cool rag on her like you were doing,” Isaac ordered. “I expect snow by morning. We can make some ice packs if it does. Thing now is to keep her brain from frying while the medicine has a chance to work its magic.”

  Thomas nodded, his mind flashing back to something the old man had said earlier about prayer.

  With most of the doctors in the country dead or hiding in bunkers, Isaac had already named both of Becca’s remaining options for survival.

  Magic and prayer.

  SEAN RETURNED a couple hours later with two fat possums and news that the snow was falling.

  “If there are any patrols, they’ll tuck themselves away someplace warm,” he suggested, washing the blood from his hands after he finished skinning the beasts.

  Isaac took over, cutting the meat from the bones into stew-sized chunks. He directed Sean over to the cabinets below the built-in seats at the front of the trailer. Inside was a slow cooker and a twelve volt battery that it hooked up to. Isaac tossed in the turnips and sweet potatoes he had optimistically dug up from his deer plot after showing Sean where the crossbow was.

  “That is some grade A equipment,” Isaac said, pointing the tip of the knife at the night vision goggles Sean was stuffing into the pack. “Getting a possum at his time of the night in his own woods.”

  “Came off a Marine Scout Sniper,” Thomas said as he took another reading of Becca’s temperature.

  Isaac had found some aspirin only two months past their expiration date. Thomas had ground some up and put it in the water same as he had given Becca the horse pill. She was now down to an even one hundred and three degrees.

  Thomas left the trailer to ease the discomfort weighing at his bladder. Walking to where the trees bordered the field, he took care of his physical needs then packed together a couple of snowballs. The white stuff still floated down from the sky in fat flakes. It was sticky enough that he could form a basic sphere with a few pats but loose enough that, when he pitched the first one at the nearest tree, it exploded in a satisfying puff. He packed the next two tighter and took them back to the trailer for Becca.

  Six hours after the first dose of the antibiotic, they gave her a second one and then another six hours later, her fever down to one hundred and two.

  She was improving and the desperate knot in his chest was easing—until the third dose.

  That was when his wife died.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

 

  THIRTY MINUTES after the dose was administered, the seizure began with a twitch of Becca’s fingers. At first, Thomas thought she was running formulas in her sleep, but her toes were twitching, too. The rhythmic jump and fall of her muscles spread rapidly from fingers and toes to legs and arms and then her entire torso whipped her around the bed.

  Despite her unconscious state, something like a scream left her, the vocal cords and lungs seizing and forcing air out.

  As Sean and Isaac surged toward Becca, Thomas jumped from where he was sitting on the floor next to her and onto the bed, gathering Becca’s arms in front of her and rolling her on her side. With one pillow already under Becca’s head, Thomas grabbed the second one and used it as a barrier to keep her from smashing her skull against the side of the lipped counter.

  Less than two minutes later, Becca ceased all movement. Thomas eased her onto her back, feeling for a pulse.

  “Nothing…” he said, looking at Isaac as his own limbs went numb.

  “Get her on the floor!” the old man yelled, moving aside for Sean to help.

  Together, Sean and Thomas got Becca on her back on the narrow strip of floor. They pulled her to where her chest was even with the door, giving them room to work on her.

  With two fingers lightly placed against Becca’s carotid artery, Isaac held the back of a spoon in front of her nose. She wasn’t breathing on her own and any pulse she had was too faint to detect by touch.

  “We have to start CPR,” he ordered, a calm entering his voice.

  He looked at Thomas.

  “Can you do chest compressions?”

  His tongue thick with fear, Thomas could only nod and get in position.

  Isaac looked at Sean with the next order. “You’ll need to breathe for her.”

  Sean pinched off Becca’s nose, his other hand tilting her chin up as he closed his mouth around hers. He waited for Thomas to finish thirty chest compressions before he dipped his head to blow the first of two breaths into Becca’s mouth.

  The air puffed her cheeks out, the chest never rising and all of the life saving oxygen releasing from her mouth the instant Sean broke the seal. Giving her chin a more aggressive tilt, he tried again.

  And got the same result.

  “Her airway’s swollen shut,” Isaac warned as Thomas resumed compressions. “Keep trying!”

  Isaac got up and stepped over Becca’s inert form. He pulled the drawer by the sink out and dumped its contents on the counter. He grabbed a pairing knife and a drinking straw, then opened up the bottom cupboard, the door half blocked by Becca’s feet. His hand disappeared then emerged with a bottle of moonshine.

  Thomas had just finished another thirty compressions and Sean tried two more breaths.

  Three minutes, Thomas desperately thought as he watched his wife’s chest refuse to inflate. She could already be three minutes into no oxygen reaching her brain.

  Isaac sank down to his knees, uncapped the bottle of moonshine and splashed Becca’s throat before taking a swig and putting it aside.

  “Sweet Jesus, never thought I would have to do another one of these!” Isaac said. “Now hold her still.”

  Sean wrapped his hands around Becca’s skull. Thomas reached for her shoulders as Isaac dipped the knife’s blade into the moonshine.

  Becca jerked, her hands flying up. Eyes flicking open, she seized Thomas around his biceps and gasped.

  Isaac dropped the knife, then quickly recovered it as another “Sweet Jesus!” left his mouth.

  Just as suddenly as she had come back, Becca collapsed again. Isaac checked her pulse, tears of relief starting to roll down the old man’s cheeks.

  “It’s there, weak, but it’s there.”

  Isaac put the spoon near her nose, but Thomas didn’t need to see the mist of her breath, he could see the soft rise and fall of her breasts.

  Together, Thomas and Sean got Becca back on the mattress.

  “Was it the antibiotic?” Thomas asked once his wife was settled.

  Isaac chewed over the question as he took Becca’s temperature, the display mirroring the prior reading of one hundred and two degrees.

  “Could be from the fever.”

  “It was going down,” Thomas argued.

  Isaac set the thermometer aside. “But she’s been running one for more than a week you said. The infection is affecting her heart, all of her major organs.”

  “So do we give her another dose when the time comes?” Sean asked, the same question banging around inside Thomas’s head.

  The old man scratched at his chin. “I don’t see a rash, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an allergic reaction. I’ve heard of some cancer patients having to get Benadryl drips so they can have their chemo medicine. It’s a year past its expiration date, but I’ve got some of that. Could give her a heavy dose of the Benadryl before the next antibiotic, and less of the antibiotic than before.”

  He stopped talking and released a heavy sigh as he shook his head.

  “But the Benadryl might be too much
for her heart,” he said after a few more seconds of thinking. “It’s already given out once today.”

  IN THE END, with Becca’s fever beginning to climb again, Thomas consented to trying the Benadryl and a smaller dose of the horse pill. If the seizure had been a reaction to the antibiotic, it did not repeat and Becca’s temperature crawled slowly down the scale on the second day.

  Thomas didn’t leave her side except for once or twice when his bladder felt like it was ammunition in a water balloon fight. He stretched alongside her on the thin mattress, his fingers wrapping around her wrist to detect the first tremors of another seizure.

  His cheek touched hers. An orchestra could have played in the woods outside the hidden travel trailer and he wouldn’t have heard it. He focused all of his attention on his wife’s shallow intakes of breath.

  He was constantly awake and listening.

  Two days later, Becca opened her eyes. Except for that brief flash that canceled the tracheotomy, it was the first time she had opened them since Thomas and Sean loaded her into the raft and carried her toward the barn. Neck stiff, she didn’t move her head immediately, just stared at the scene painted on a piece of muslin stapled above the bed. A cavorting faun chased a nymph around an oak tree, their play replicated by two rabbits as a robin and its mate looked down from one of the branches.

  The first to notice Becca was awake, Isaac startled her with a soft laugh and a few words about the artist.

  “Was my Helen who did those.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

 

  SEAN TOOK down a deer the day after Becca woke. Thomas returned to sleeping on the floor when he wasn’t out scouting the woods.

  He took Gavin’s journal with him when he left the trailer. He was halfway through deciphering what was, most often, a bullet list of doom. Based on Gavin’s estimates, more than seventy percent of America’s above ground population would be decimated as November reached its end—a day that was fast approaching. As the weather grew colder in December, that number would reach ninety percent before the year ended.

  Nine out of ten people—less than one out of five—would be dead.

  What did that mean for his son and daughter, or his wife? The projected survival rate was especially disheartening considering that the majority of those still alive on the surface as the new year rolled around would be the hired guns.

  Decimating the cities came first—along with killing specific targets and securing high value individuals who had not been told of the project before initiation of Phase I.

  Individuals like Becca and Hannah.

  The thought had occurred to Thomas while he watched Becca teeter at the edge of dying that he would be able to get her medical help if he found one of the patrols and flagged them down. They would have killed him, but she wouldn’t have had the seizure and stopped breathing because her throat swelled shut and her heart stopped.

  So why hadn’t he done just that?

  “Hey,” Sean whispered from the bottom of the tree where Isaac had one of three blinds set up. “Deer steaks are about done.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” Thomas called.

  “I’ll wait.”

  Great, the kid wanted to talk to him. It was a rare event and one that Thomas never looked forward to.

  He put the journal and Art of War in his pack and lowered the bag down on the pulley attached to the blind then descended the rope ladder. He could feel Sean’s gaze on him the whole time.

  He landed with a grunt and a glance at the young man.

  “What is it, Junior?”

  He heard the muted click at the back of Sean’s throat that signaled mild annoyance. Thomas raised one brow in a subtle repetition of the question. His one small amusement was poking at the kid.

  “Becca is talking about leaving.”

  “Of course she is,” Thomas sighed. He was surprised she had waited an entire day before saying anything—or maybe she had said something to Sean the first time Thomas left the trailer.

  “It’s too soon.”

  “Agreed,” Thomas grunted.

  “What are you going to do?” Sean asked.

  “What are you going to do, Junior?” Thomas laughed as he return kicked the question. He was pretty certain his wife no longer cared for his counsel.

  Sean lengthened his stride, throwing out an insult before his angry pace left Thomas far behind.

  “Prick.”

  IT WASN’T Becca’s health that kept her from leaving that day or the next.

  It was her humanity.

  She was the first to notice the indecision churning inside Isaac. The man had survived a war that had never ended for some. He had been dispossessed from his home. His animals had been cruelly slaughtered. The only mercy, if it could be called that, was his wife had died a few years before the rest of his world had started its collapse.

  But Isaac had not lost everything. His past lingered there in the trailer. There were precious memories that cried out in every nook and cranny to be caressed.

  He was old, too. Sixty-nine and counting was not the age for a long journey on foot, with winter on their heels and a bull’s eye on their backs.

  Yet part of Isaac leaned toward leaving even though they had not told him specifically where they were going or what awaited them at the end of their trip. The other part of him, the one that didn’t want to abandon his memories, tried to convince Becca, Sean and Thomas to stay.

  He knew the land, he said.

  He had skills, he reminded them.

  They were welcome to everything he had, he promised.

  Thomas broke the stalemate. Sitting down to a breakfast of re-warmed deer meat, he pulled out Gavin’s journal. He told the three of them everything he knew except for the role Becca had unwittingly played. He explained how there were regional bunkers and that they would pass near one on their trip to reach Hannah and Ellis.

  That, he theorized, was why the bridges along the Ohio River were guarded around the clock and why patrols had been ravaging the farms and woods in rural Kentucky from the beginning of Phase I despite the area’s smaller population.

  With each detail revealed, Isaac grew more livid.

  He pounded the counter, his wrinkled countenance darkening with rage.

  He shook a fist at the curved roof of the trailer.

  All those buddies dead in Vietnam.

  All the young men who came after him and died or left pieces off them behind in the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq.

  “For what?” he railed.

  To keep the world looking in the wrong direction, to keep populations spending? To artificially raise the price of stocks and commodities? To create hidden military budgets spent on bunkers for a Doomsday that all the major governments had orchestrated?

  “We’re going to get those bastards!” Isaac declared, pounding his fist again. “We’re going to find your kids and then we’ll get those bastards, pull them out of their concrete holes and skin them like the snakes they are!”

  Even Sean, rootless before he had rescued Becca, answered the old man with a nod and a slow, controlled release of air.

  “Sounds about right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

 

  INTENT ON AVOIDING the hills for the first few days as Becca continued to recover and Isaac adjusted to more prolonged, strenuous activity, Thomas and Sean picked a route that would run alongside I-69. With eighty miles as the crow flies to reach Dover, and not one of them being crows, Thomas figured on covering five solid miles each day. Some days would be less than that as they sourced water and food, hid from patrols, or carefully circumnavigated any small town they couldn’t avoid completely. And on some days they would get lucky and make more miles, their bellies and their water containers full.

  But the goal was two weeks to reach the town of Dover, Tennessee. Longer than that and they would run the risk of winter killing them—at least some of them.

 
; The itinerary began its inevitable decline on day one. Becca was still sick, only now she was out in the cold and exerting herself. Isaac’s joints were stiffening up, something Thomas could read by the change in the man’s gait. They made three and a half miles that day. The next day, they made even less. On the third morning, Becca’s temperature was rising again, the display reading one hundred point eight.

  Leaving Sean on guard, Thomas separated from the group under the pretense of scouting their route for the day. Really, he needed to think through his options.

  The first option was for them to carry on as planned, only at a slower pace. Becca would willingly walk herself into the grave before agreeing to any other option. Second, they could all turn back with the intention of giving Becca more time to recover. Thomas or Sean could scout for more medicine. If they didn’t find medication, her recovery could take weeks—or she could die fighting the infection. Either way, unless she recovered quickly, winter would be in full swing and they would be heading out during the harsher months, reaching the highest elevations at the worst time, or burrowing deep and waiting until spring.

  Third, he could send the three of them back to Isaac’s, Sean providing protection while Thomas pushed forward to Dover by any means necessary. What little Hannah had been able to communicate in her coded message, she had tried to sell the Dover location as one of resources. Maybe that meant medicine, fuel, weapons and ammunition that would allow him to retrieve and heal Becca.

  The third option would have been his choice as a commander in the field. But it would leave Becca without his protection once more. Isaac’s land might come under attack from a random patrol. Becca’s condition might further deteriorate. Hell, he might not make it to Dover or find that the kids never did, or the resources were nonexistent.

  Nearing the crest of a bluff that overlooked a county road, Thomas put his pack down and crawled to the top with his rifle and field glasses. He peered through them at a grain co-op that looked like it had been abandoned long ago, its graded drive and turnaround lot half grown over with weeds.