Mike started to run for the church. His goal was the concrete steps leading up to the front door. It was time to get out of dodge as the last two explosions were imminent and he was too close. He took off running as the group saw him. They opened fire immediately. He couldn’t see how many were left standing, nor pick it out over the screams, shouts, flames and the pop and crackle of flesh as the dead were still too close to the fire.
A round hit him square in the back, right on the plate, and he was thrown on his face, losing a yard of his cheek and neck until his momentum was spent. The slide did another thing that saved his life as rounds kicked up dirt and rocks near him… he slid in next to the concrete steps. Again, he closed his eyes and made sure to open his mouth as another car went up. He didn’t open his eyes until the last explosion went off and then he tried to turn over.
His back felt shattered, broken. His legs didn’t want to work, so he focused on blocking out the pain and wiggling his toes. He felt them scrape his sock against the toe of the boot. Not having time to be incapacitated with pain, he pulled himself up to his knees using the side of the steps, his carbine and elbow on one side, his hand on the other. A man was walking through the wreckage, a pistol in his hand and both hands to the side of his head. He was stalking back and forth between the dead, screaming incoherent words. Mike took careful aim and put three rounds down range and watched the impact. The man spun toward him in slow motion and aimed his pistol in Mike’s direction.
The man fell about the same time Mike was able to get his left foot up and on solid ground. He powered up and got to his feet slowly, and put his back to the outer wall of the church, breathing in deeply. It was a lot closer than he’d expected. He did a quick mag change for a full one, putting the half fired one in his dump pouch. The ring of fire and black smoke from burning cars and fuel was like something out of Dante’s Inferno. The screams had died off, but the flames still licked the air hungrily. A sickly sweet smell of cooking meat reached his nose, and he fought off the gagging sensation.
All targets down. He hadn’t gotten a count, but he could see twelve forms, or what he thought were the torsos of twelve forms. That was when he realized he was hearing something from within the church. It wasn’t yelling but crying. A different pitch than the shouts and screams of men. Higher pitched, softer, yet with volume. Feminine. Mike eased around the corner and walked up the steps and looked in the glass pane of the front door. The frosted glass was hard to make out the interior, it was dark inside, and the reflection of the fires behind him further blinded him.
He stood off to the side and pulled the door open wide and made sure to pull back quick. No gunfire followed, but the wailing was more apparent now as he walked in, trying not to silhouette himself. Movement caught his eye, and he turned as the short entranceway opened up to a one room church. The pews had been shoved off to the right-hand side from the doorway, many of them haphazardly thrown one on top of another. On the left side of the church were numerous forms, huddled together, crying, holding each other.
“Stand up, all of you,” Mike intoned deeply, his carbine on the low and ready.
“Americano?” a woman called back in a steady voice.
“Si,” Mike answered her back.
A woman stood slowly from the middle of the jam pile of bodies, gently pushing hands away that were trying to pull her back down.
“How many are you?” Mike asked.
“Many, there were more, but the Caliphate took some for wives.”
Mike cursed, and many of the women cried out in terror.
“I’m sorry, ladies, I’m here to help, is there anybody else in here?”
“I have not seen Ernesto Cabrillo, he is the head of this…” she said, motioning around.
“Is Ernesto still tight or in contact with the Caliphate?” Mike asked her.
“No, they moved out last week. We were brought here after they were gone.”
Too late. He wanted to curse again, but he didn’t want to terrify the women more.
“Ernesto is dead. I think I got all of them, so if you’d like to come with me, I’ll take you to friends who can help.”
“Where?” a small voice asked, and Dick looked down and saw his daughter Maggie.
“Mags?” he asked.
The girl looked at him in confusion, and he walked toward her slowly, watching her, and handed his carbine to the woman he’d been talking to. She hesitated and then pointed the carbine at him, its barrel shaking.
“Don’t do it, Mary,” Dick told her, “that’s the end you fire from. You know how to shoot, we spent a ton of time at your dad’s farm, I’m just getting—”
“Mister?” the little girl said, holding her arms out.
He lifted her and Mary finally lowered the barrel. She spoke in rapid-fire Spanish, and the rest of the women moved apart slowly. Dick heard one of them mutter ‘loco’ but ignored it as he put the little girl back down. It wasn’t his daughter, he’d done it again. He’d slipped. In the heat of combat, he was laser focused, but in the aftermath, his mind reverted to the psychosis that had ruled over him the last four years. Having gotten a dose of the real Maggie and Mary, he was able to fight off the delusion with some effort.
“I’m sorry if I scared you, you looked like my daughter; I got a little confused,” he said to her.
“Is okay, mister. Where are we going?”
“Over the river,” Mike said, fighting back the darkness that had consumed much of his life.
“That is where we were heading when we were captured,” the woman he called Mary said and, after a moment, she held up the carbine, stock up.
Mike took it and slung it over his shoulder.
“How did you know my name was Mary?” she asked, her accent thick.
Mike ignored her question. “Who needs help? Is anybody hurt?”
11
“He did it,” Sandra said with a grin.
“Who did what?” Blake asked, lying in bed with his wife.
Neither of them could sleep, and Chris was crashed out on his toddler bed in the corner of the bedroom. With the Homestead not being as densely populated now, there was room for him to take a room in the basement, but he preferred to be with his adopted parents. Blake didn’t mind; the horrors the kid had seen probably haunted him the same way as Sandra, who tossed and turned, calling out names of the dead.
“Mike. Information was spotty, but apparently, he just staggered into camp with his companion, Courtney, and about twenty women and young girls. He hit the cartel.”
“Is everyone okay?” Blake asked.
He knew his wife had gone to the other room for that transmission, and he’d figured it was because she was restless and didn’t want to wake him or Chris.
“He’s got road rash, but they patched him up and shot him full of antibiotics. The ladies…” Sandra made an iffy gesture with her hand, “…they were hurt pretty bad, half of them have STDs from their ordeal. They are doing what they can but… there’s one lady who’s in pretty bad shape.”
“How did he do it?” Blake asked her.
“They don’t know. He managed to get everyone back to Courtney with a stolen farm truck, and then once they made the meet he kind of fell apart.”
“What do you mean?” Blake asked her.
“He kept demanding to see his daughter Maggie. It took so long because Courtney had to take him to a dark room in an abandoned house near the meet-up to sit on him to get him calm enough to debrief.”
“He’s a loose cannon,” Blake said, his skin breaking out into goose bumps.
“He’s on our side, though,” she said. “There’s a lot of people like him in the world. Damaged by what they’ve gone through, what they were forced to do. That might make some of them scary, but it’s not really their fault,” Sandra said, her nail scratching across Blake’s stomach until he twisted as it tickled.
“Stop,” Blake said, turning to her with a grin. “So it was a success?”
“Yes, he ev
en got the cartel boss, but the Caliphate contacts had already moved out.”
“I wonder why?” he asked rhetorically.
“Well, remember one of our goals was for him to get some communications gear from them?”
“Yeah?”
Sandra turned on her side to face him. “He got it. They are building up division strength groups. Sounds like John’s group was wildly successful, and we have DHS traitors who are singing like canaries. It’ll all be over soon.”
“How so?” Blake asked.
“As soon as Col. Grady gets to a secure location, I’m going to pass the locations of the massed troops to him for the Air Force to do a bombing run. This war for America… If it turns out they really are bunched up as they seem…”
“What about collateral damage? What if they have hostages with them? Women they’ve—”
“I’m not going to make that call, and neither are you,” Sandra said, kissing his chin. “I’m going to hand this mess off as soon as I can, and we can go on and raise our kids. It won’t be long, and we’ll have the farm mostly to ourselves.”
“Except for Mom and Dad, Bobby…”
“I know you, Blake, you aren’t booting anybody who doesn’t want to go. This doesn’t need to be a military installation soon. Oh, we’ll still have stuff here, but if most of the fight is over, we can reassign a lot of the armor and anti-aircraft systems to Silverman.”
“I don’t mind having people around,” Blake said with a grin, using his finger to trace around his wife’s forehead. “I actually like having all the kids around. We’ve got a pretty good group.”
“Yeah, and Keeley is going to mother hen all of the younger ones. I worry she’s taking on too much,” Sandra said, changing the subject.
“She’s doing it to cope,” Blake told her. “We had a long talk. She had to be a parent for a sibling when her parents never came home. She was alone when the EMP hit, babysitting. Things were good for a while, but she ran out of insulin for her little—”
“Shhhhh, no more,” Sandra said, putting a finger to his lips.
Blake was doing his daily walk with the kids. It was late fall, and it had gotten cold enough to put frost on the ground on some of the hills they wandered. Scavenging teams were looking for winter gear for the growing kids, but more than half of them were already outfitted with years’ worth of supplies. Chris was carrying a sack of gleaned goodies for the supper pot when he nudged his father and pointed. Blake looked, and it took him a second. A doe was standing perfectly still, almost eighty yards away. He made a hand motion, and the kids lowered themselves to the ground silently.
Blake made a watch and stay here gesture and stalked forward. The wind was on his back, blowing toward the deer, so he knew he didn’t have long to make his shot. The deer had heard their approach and held still, relying on its natural camouflage to keep it hidden. Blake was moving for a better angle for his shot; he had been teaching the kids how to forage and hunt, and he was proud that his son had been the first to spot the deer, even before his father. He stopped behind an old, gnarly tree and took careful aim.
The shot went off, startling Blake as it should have, and he saw the deer hop straight up, half spinning in the air. He worked the bolt on his rifle, and the deer took one bound before its legs folded as it landed.
“You got it,” Chris screamed, running up jump tackling his dad in a massive hug.
Blake had put his rifle on safety and raised it over his head as the other kids got up, though not quite as fast nor as enthusiastically as Chris.
“Easy, buddy, I still have a gun in my hands. I put it on safe, but you can’t do that, not when we’re hunting.”
Little hands gave one last squeeze to his waist and then fell away.
“Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean…”
“No harm, no foul. Now we’re going to wait a good ten minutes or more before we walk up on it,” Blake said.
“Why are we going to wait?” Keeley asked.
“To make sure he’s dead. Even if he’s dead, his nerves can fire off, making them kick, and they’ve got sharp hooves. Don’t want to get a hole in your head, do ya?” Blake asked her with a grin.
Keeley stood there a moment and put her hand on her hip in a move that reminded Blake of Sandra. “It won’t hurt the likes of Jason, he’s got nothing up there,” she snarked, looking at the teenager.
“When the wind blows hard, your brains get scrambled. We’re just lucky that this deer didn’t smell you this time.”
“I took a bath,” Keeley said in a dangerous tone.
“Could have fooled me,” Jason told her and bolted.
Blake watched him get four steps before Keeley tackled him. Both were in their mid-teens and were wrestling. What Keeley lacked in size and strength, she made up for in technique and skill and soon had him pinned to the ground, an arm across his throat until he let out a squeak of surprise.
“Maybe she wants to play Legos?” Chris whispered at his grinning dad.
“I do not stink,” Keeley seethed.
Jason looked around, and when Blake’s eyes met his, Blake shrugged his shoulders to let him know he had this one on his own.
“You don’t stink—”
He made a choking sound as she put more pressure on his throat. Blake was almost ready to stop things when she let up.
“What was that again?” Keeley asked sweetly, but everyone could hear the malice in her words as she straddled him.
“It’s just that… when you’re around, I can’t think right. I say stupid things I don’t mean. I’m sorry.”
Keeley looked at him a moment and then pulled her arm back. Then she got up and held a hand out to Jason. He took it, and she helped him to his feet. He was brushing himself off when she leaned in, took his head between her hands, and made him look up. She planted a wet one on his cheek and then laughed delightedly when he started to stutter, his face turning an alarming shade of red.
“Took you long enough,” she said to him and then turned to Blake. “Has it been ten minutes yet?”
“Dad,” Chris said before he could answer, tugging on his hand, “I don’t think she wants to just play Legos, just saying.”
12
“What do we have?” Col. Grady asked, walking into the hastily put together ready room.
It was in a different bunker location, one not far from where he’d been hiding out. This one had better communications equipment and was plugged into everything. He’d agreed to go back and had been giving orders nonstop until he’d gone inside. It was a blackened room with computer terminals at every seat around an oval-shaped table. Monitors showed up to date satellite images on the screen, and there were dozens of people speaking into headsets. Heads of the Navy, Army, and Air Force were all in attendance.
“Our subs have sunk every North Korean sub and surface ship in American waters in the last three hours, sir,” an operator he didn’t recognize said.
“Casualties?” Grady asked.
“Sir, we lost two Los Angeles Class…”
“Rescue operations?” Grady asked.
“Underway, sir. Ambassador Lin has been on secure communications, and is waiting to hear from you. He insisted you were the only one he would speak with,” a different operator told him.
“Tell him I’ll be with him shortly,” Grady said and turned to his top Air Force liaison. “We’ve gotten word from the Kentucky Mafia—”
“Sir, the American Militia,” the liaison said with a grin.
“We got word from the Kentucky Mafia,” Grady said, also grinning, “that somebody has intercepted some of the New Caliphate’s comms equipment and they have up to date data on where the main portion of the enemy is located. Do we have views on satellite?”
An operator hit a few keys, and the view on one of the screens changed. The picture wasn’t clear.
“We’ll have eyes on site within two minutes, sir.”
“Good, I want eyes on them as soon as possible. If this is, in fact,
their main forces, I want all the newly recalled bombers scrambled and every available drone in the air.”
“We may not have enough operators,” another man piped up. “A lot of them were in the base that got—”
“I said every available, whether it’s lack of materials or men. I want everyone armed and ready to go. Also, I want to know any intel on civilians who may be a hostage with them. We’ve gotten word that they’ve taken the women and children from occupied areas. I don’t want to be bombing Americans.”
“Sir, intercepted intel is saying that the hostages are in the rearmost of the moving column that’s heading to the DHS base being occupied by Militia Special Forces Operatives.”
“Good. I want somebody on the horn coordinating ground forces with Kentucky. I want them to become the hammer to our anvil. We’re going to crush the New Caliphate between the bombing, the ground forces, and the Rocky Mountains. We’re done playing games, and the Rules of Engagement from the previous administration are at this moment revoked. Kill the enemy. This is a fight for our very lives, freedom, and The American Way.”
Somebody in the background let out a rebel yell, and soon clapping could be heard around the room. Grady let it go on for a moment and then held up both hands.
“I know you’re all be anxious to get to work but—”
“Sir, I have two satellites on target now,” an operator said, and suddenly all screens were filling with both sets of feed.
“Good, make sure our intel is good. You boys know what to do.”
Hope Of The World Page 6
