19
The teams went in hot, ready for anything.
There was no way for Laurie to prevent the attack. He’d done all he could to warn Burgess of what they could expect in terms of retaliation, now all he could do was sit back and count the casualties.
Laurie led his own team and ensured to give the house as wide a berth as possible as they worked their way around the rear of the property. He went first and scaled over the fence. He stepped in thick mud that sucked at his boots. It was a small allotment for growing vegetables.
He recalled the stew they gave him just a few short hours ago. It was fresh and he could taste the lack of salt, additives, and preservatives. It tasted the same when his uncle cooked him meals using ingredients sourced from the local farm.
A heavy stone formed in the pit of his stomach. There was more to this property than met the eye. The cantankerous old man didn’t have the appearance of someone who minced his words or took shit from anybody.
He also wasn’t the kind of man who didn’t prepare himself for every eventuality.
Laurie froze when he caught the subtle glint of early sunlight off the wire that ran between the neat furrows of fresh fruit and vegetables. He rested his foot between the furrows and gently eased himself forward, adopting the sideways gait of a crab as he crept over one furrow after another.
He kept his eyes alert, paying particular attention to the upstairs windows where a man would be keeping watch.
The second team swept around the back of the house on the opposite side. Laurie felt relieved that Burgess took some notice of what he told him about their level of preparedness.
Laurie took his time traversing the cabbage patch. He didn’t want to get to the house first.
Behind him, someone hissed.
He turned to find one of his men – he thought his name was Peter – with his hand on Laurie’s leg. Laurie looked an inch in front of where he was going to place his foot and knew what he was going to find there before he even saw it.
A mine.
Laurie’s attention snapped in the direction of the farmhouse’s back porch where the second team crept forward. The team’s leader looked down…
“Freeze!” Laurie bellowed into the night.
The second team’s leader lifted his foot.
Too late.
The blast ruffled Laurie’s hair and a wall of heat slammed into his face, knocking him onto his back. His head struck something solid and a curtain of darkness drew over his eyes.
20
The explosion of noise knocked Katie off balance. Ella emitted a small scream and Scallywag yelped.
An intense burst of yellow light bleached the surrounding landscape and faded almost as quickly as it’d come. In that single blink, the farmhouse tore itself apart, its innards flying into the night and lumps of brick and wood rained down from the sky. Several figures dressed in black lay on the ground, pummelled by the falling detritus.
Bill and the others turned out to be right about Laurie. There was too much of the military about him, they said. His story didn’t match with the dangerous man he undoubtedly was. They packed their bags the moment he crept out the door.
Half a mile away and breaching the crest of a hillside, each member carried a large backpack crammed with everything they needed to survive a long journey.
On her grandfather’s face, Katie saw the crushed look of someone who lost everything in a single moment of blinding light. But weakness wasn’t a garment Bill wore well, especially out in public, so he turned his back on her and continued up the hill.
Without a single word, the others followed suit.
21
They didn’t stop until midday. Surrounded by woodland and singing birds and the gentle tock-tock-tock of a woodpecker out there somewhere, they could almost have been enjoying a nice stroll or a weekend camping trip.
Almost, but not quite.
It was hard to ignore the cannons Bill and the others sported. Katie was used to seeing guns. That wasn’t what shocked her. It was the sheer size of the weapons they carried. They might have been soldiers sent behind enemy lines to gather intel with the kind of hardware they carried.
Camden and Hanna took responsibility for Jodie, who was still unable to walk and had to be carried by stretcher. If the going was tough for Katie, she dreaded to think how tough it was for her brother. He groaned as they set Jodie down. They took a break and feasted on the leftovers from the stew they cooked the previous day.
“How can you eat like there’s nothing weird going on here?” Camden said.
Aaron looked up from his meal. “What’s weird?”
“Soldiers. Coming to kill us. Doesn’t that strike anyone else as weird?”
“It does strike me,” Darryl said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had someone try to kill me before.”
“Then consider yourself lucky.” Ronnie tore the meat off a bone. “People try to kill me all the time.”
Tanya ruffled Ronnie’s hair. “Rascal never lets me get what I want.”
“Why did they want to kill us?” Camden said.
Bill mopped his brow with a dirty handkerchief. “No one said they tried to kill us.”
“They sure as shit weren’t trying to get us to buy brownies,” Camden said.
“Hey, watch your language.” Katie covered Ella’s ears. “We’ve got children present.”
Camden turned to their grandfather. “Have you failed to pay your taxes or something?”
Bill grunted. “Recently? I never gave those lying buzzards a single penny when I could help it.”
“And the last I checked, they don’t blow your house up for not paying taxes,” Aaron added.
“No, they take it out from under you instead,” Bill said. “Why destroy what you can sell on at a profit?”
“So what did they want?” Darryl said. “You must have annoyed someone at some point. Do you have enemies?”
Aaron rolled his eyes. “That’s like asking if Dr Evil has any hairless cats.”
“Dr who?” Bill said.
“No, that’s another guy,” Aaron said.
“So who were those guys?” Katie said. “The ones dressed in black.”
“There’s plenty of people who want to put a bullet in me,” Bill said. “There’s several sitting around this fire right now who want to do that.”
“True enough,” Tanya said.
“Dead right,” Ronnie said.
“But after the EMP, there’s no one I can think of that would want to do it,” Bill said. “People have other problems to worry about. I’m the least of their concerns right now.”
“Someone wants you dead,” Aaron said. “No name comes to mind?”
“As I said. No one right now. A few abroad maybe. But not right here, not right now.”
“Maybe it was someone who followed us,” Darryl said. “One of those people from the slave farm.”
Aaron shook his head. “The people who came to the house were well-armed and well-trained. They were from the military. I’d bet my left boll–” He caught sight of Ella watching him. “My left testicle on it.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Well, that’s a lot better.”
“Why would the military want to blow your house up?” Darryl said.
“They didn’t,” Bill said. “That was my security system.”
“Your security system?”
“In case someone came around who shouldn’t.”
Darryl paled. “What if it’d been us?”
“It would have taught you to call someone before you turned up in the middle of the night at their house.”
“But… if you had a normal alarm system, you’d still have a house.”
“And a bunch of them would still be alive, looking to kill us. You’re welcome.”
Darryl looked at the others. Is this guy joking? But he could tell from their expressions they knew he wasn’t. “With other people’s security systems, you wave a tea towel to dispel the smoke. Or you call up the security co
mpany to put in a code to turn it off. At worst, the police turn up and you have to explain the situation. With your system, you have to pick chunks of your grandkids off the walls.”
Bill shrugged. “There are pluses and minuses to every security system.”
Darryl shook his head. “This is the craziest family I’ve ever met.”
“The short answer is, we don’t know why they’re after us,” Aaron said. “We might never know. Either way, it doesn’t change our goal.”
“What goal?” Katie said. “We’re trapped in the woods with nowhere to go.”
“We want to get to your father’s lodge as fast as possible,” Aaron said. “From what your grandfather told me about your father, he was a man who liked to be prepared. That lodge might be the only place we can mount an effective defence against the units hot on our tail.”
The lodge. So, they were finally heading to it. Without their grandfather’s farm to retreat to, they had no other choice.
The twins shook their heads incredulously. Then they shrugged.
“But we’re in,” Tanya said. “Afterall, what would you do without us?”
Bill’s lips quirked into a smile.
Katie took her grandfather to one side.
“You don’t need to escort us to the lodge. We can make it ourselves.”
“People are after us. We don’t know who they are or what they want. Only that it’s the military, and we know them better than you ever will.”
“I don’t like it. You don’t need to put yourselves in danger.”
“Girl, we’ve been putting ourselves in danger long before you were born.”
“A smaller group is safer.”
“It is – when you’re fully trained.”
Katie raised her chin. “We are trained. Father taught us.”
“Your father taught you the basics, what you needed to know to survive in a pinch. These men – and woman – are the best-trained fighters you’ll find on this side of the Atlantic. Among the best fighters in the world.”
Katie glanced over at the twins’ bulging stomachs.
“All right, so they might have put on a few extra ounces–”
“And the rest.”
“But they’re hard workers and the skills you develop during wartime are skills you never lose.”
“They eat a lot. Can we really carry that much food with us?” Katie said in all seriousness.
Bill stared at her. His shoulders began to shake and he pressed his hands to his stomach and hacked in the back of his throat.
“Grandfather?” She looked to the others for help.
They turned but none of them lifted a finger to help.
“He’s choking!” Katie said. “He’s choking! Somebody grab him!”
“He’s not choking,” Tanya said.
Bill threw his head back and let out a thunderous roar of laughter.
Katie stood back, a little afraid of what she was seeing.
First a smile, and now laughter. This was it. They’d said it for years and now it was finally happening.
Grandfather was going insane.
He wiped the tears from his eyes and regained control of himself. “We’re heading north. And we’re going to move as fast as we can. I guarantee the military will be hot on our tail. They’ll catch us if we don’t get a move on, so let’s get going.”
22
“How did they escape?”
Burgess’s words sounded a little muffled as if speaking through water. The medics checked Laurie’s eardrums and found they hadn’t ruptured. With time, they would return to normal, they said. Still, Laurie had to concentrate to hear the captain.
Burgess stared down his nose at Laurie. His eyes were too close together and reminded Laurie of a bird of prey swooping in for the kill.
“They were better prepared than we expected, sir,” Laurie said.
“Better prepared than the military? I find that very hard to believe.”
Believe it or not, but it’s true.
“They were trained by the military, sir,” Laurie said. “They know how to defend themselves. These aren’t regular citizens.”
Burgess didn’t blink. “It seems strange to me that they should know we were going to attack them. It’s almost as if someone told them we were coming.”
Burgess sipped from a glass of whiskey and let the words percolate in Laurie’s mind.
“I didn’t tell them anything about us, sir,” Laurie said. “I went to gather intelligence. Nothing more.”
“You disobeyed a direct order.”
“Technically, sir, you didn’t expressly forbid me from going over there, only that you thought it wasn’t a good idea.”
“Slippery word games aren’t going to help you get out of this, Lieutenant.”
“I was brought here to find and deal with those who broke into and stole supplies from one of our silos,” Laurie said. “That is what I was sent here to do, and that’s what I’ll do. But I won’t let you murder innocent people.”
“We’ve been through this.”
“And yet, the message still isn’t getting through.”
Burgess’s fist clenched tighter around the whiskey glass so hard Laurie thought it would break. “You’re being insubordinate. I am the ranking officer here and what I say goes.”
What could Laurie say to that? It wasn’t the true nature of the situation. Laurie was meant to be in charge of the investigation. Burgess was there to facilitate him, nothing more.
“You’re dismissed,” Burgess said.
Laurie saluted and turned to leave, grateful to finally get away from this madness.
But that wasn’t going to get him what he wanted.
He slowed halfway to the exit and considered what Burgess’s next move would be. He would pursue the family and hunt them down. There would be no mercy for killing their brothers in arms. He turned and faced Burgess.
“Sir, these people aren’t the terrorists we’re looking for. I saw no sign of quad bikes or explosives. Ask the men out there now what they’ve found. They’ll tell you the same thing I am. We struck a bunch of retired soldiers and got more than we bargained for. We can’t blame them for protecting themselves. We would have done the same thing in their situation.”
Burgess considered his argument. “You were dismissed.”
I am dismissed, and so is the truth.
23
Darryl collapsed in a heap, the backpack still straddled on tight. He lay on his front, his chubby cheek pressed into the dirt. The others removed their bags and leaned them against the trees.
“Looks like it’ll be a clear night,” Bill said. “I don’t think we need tents.”
“Fire?” Aaron said.
“A small one. We don’t want to make it too easy for them to find us, do we?”
“Find us?” Darryl rolled onto his side. “We’ve been walking all day. They can’t catch up to us now.”
“They can, and they will,” Bill said. “They’ll have working vehicles.”
Darryl sighed and pressed his face into the dirt.
Camden sidled up to his grandfather and spoke gently. “Grandfather? I’m sorry about your house.”
“It’s all right,” Bill said. “There are more important things that could have been lost.”
He didn’t say what, and Camden didn’t ask, but Katie got the feeling he was genuinely referring to friends and family. It wasn’t the response she expected from the old man.
These days, there were a lot of things he said and did that she didn’t expect.
Then again, when she thought back, Bill had never really been much of a grandfather. He and their father rubbed each other up the wrong way and they always had to leave early. She never got a chance to know her grandfather.
“Before you start getting any funny ideas, I was referring to my old tractor.” Bill grinned but his eyes glinted with unshed tears.
Sitting across the fire on a fallen tree trunk they rolled from the edge of the cleari
ng, Katie sat looking at the scene taking place.
“I don’t get it,” Katie said to Aaron. “How can he care so much about his old farm and nothing at all for his only son?”
He tore the meat off a chicken leg and tossed the bone aside. “What makes you say that?”
“When my father died, we held a funeral, and he didn’t even bother to show his face. You’d have thought he would show Dad at least that much respect.”
Aaron considered what he was going to say next very carefully. “I knew an old man once, an uncle of mine, who loved his wife very much. They did everything together. It was hard to imagine them apart. Do you know how he mourned her?”
Katie shook her head.
“He travelled the world.”
Katie snorted. “He wanted his freedom back, I guess.”
“He went to lots of countries all around the world and took selfies of himself smiling. Do you know why he did that?”
“He liked photography?”
“He hated photography. He could barely work a camera when he started. He took them because those were the countries they booked to go travel the world together before she fell seriously ill. He didn’t care for travelling. He was quite happy where he was. But that didn’t stop him from carrying that spare ticket with him wherever he went. While everyone else sat by the swimming pool and played games with their family, he learned how to use photoshop and inserted his wife into them so she could be there in spirit. That’s how he mourned her.” He chewed on the vegetables in his stew without relish. “You can snort and make childish assumptions all you like, but the truth is, real life is more complicated than that. Not everyone lives their lives the same, so why should they mourn their loved ones the same way?”
Katie cleared her throat and took a few smoothing breaths before she spoke, otherwise she feared tears would spill down her cheeks. “How did grandfather mourn him?”
“You think I’m telling you that? There’s only one person who’ll tell you and he’s sitting right there across from us.”
He locked his eyes on her and stared so hard that she flinched.
Cut Off (Book 2): Cut Throat Page 8
