Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy

by Westfield, Ryan

  Defeat the Anarchy

  A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller - Constant Danger book 2

  Ryan Westfield

  Copyright © 2020 by Ryan Westfield

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About Ryan Westfield

  Also by Ryan Westfield

  1

  Meg

  “Why don’t you just move over a little, huh?”

  “I’m all the way over to the edge. What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re really all the way over?”

  She couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice. And, truth be told, she wasn’t trying that hard. She was annoyed. Very annoyed.

  “All the way over. What? You don’t believe me? You want to come over here and do an inspection or something?”

  “Maybe I will,” she snapped back.

  “Let’s just try to get some sleep,” said James. “I’m dead tired. And my injuries aren’t getting any better with all this walking.”

  “You think you’re the only one in any pain?”

  “Come on. I didn’t say that.”

  “Good.”

  They’d been at each other’s throats for a couple hours now. But, given the circumstances, it was understandable. Meg had known for a long time that the more stressed people were, the more they tended to argue. It was easier to get along on a sunny beach, while being served food, than it was when trudging for hours through thick snow, no food in sight.

  Meg squirmed again, trying somehow to find more room.

  “Cut it out, would you? I’m trying to sleep,” said James.

  “It’s not my fault you’re taking up all the room.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said James. “I’m just taking up all the room in this large luxurious shed. It sounds like you’re talking about a queen bed in a hotel room or something.”

  “What? That doesn’t even make sense. You’ve gotten your metaphors all mixed up.”

  “Well, what do you want from me? I’m exhausted, freezing, starving, and…”

  “Cry me a river.”

  They’d been hiking for the better part of a day, through heavy snow with fairly heavy packs on their backs.

  That hadn’t been the plan. They hadn’t thought it would take them so long. They’d parked the truck in a safe location, deciding that it was better to hike in. If they’d taken the truck, they would have been much more likely to be seen. What they’d intended was to sort of “stealth” hike into the area where they knew some particular houses to be. That way, if there were people already there, they wouldn’t risk the confrontation that they would have had if they’d brought the pickup.

  Right now, the pickup was hidden among the trees off the road, covered in leaves and evergreen branches. Someone might find it if they got really close to it.

  But, most likely, the truck would be safe.

  Meg and James? Maybe. Maybe not. They hoped they’d be safe. But there was only so much they could do.

  The most important step they could take, they’d decided, was to stay out of sight as much as possible. Hence the hiking. Hence spending the night in a cramped little shed in their sleeping bags.

  There really wasn’t much room in there. Meg was pushed up against an old lawn mower, a number of rakes, and what seemed to be a bucket of dozens and dozens of bungee cords.

  To say Meg wasn’t in good spirits would be an understatement.

  They’d either taken a wrong route, or the hike was simply much farther and more difficult than they’d predicted. They hadn’t brought as much food as they’d ended up needing.

  Because a fire would give them away immediately, they couldn’t make one, and so they couldn’t really do much to get warm other than huddle in their sleeping bags next to one another.

  It had been a big debate whether to take off their snow-caked gear or simply wear it into the sleeping bag.

  In the end, they’d tried to dust and brush as much of the snow off as they could, getting into the bags with basically all their clothes still on.

  Even then, with all their clothes on inside the bags, basically squished up next to one another, Meg was still shivering almost violently.

  “There’s no way I’m going to be able to sleep like this,” she said. “And even if I could fall asleep, I don’t even know if it’s safe. We might wake up dead, as they say.”

  “If you can fall asleep, it’s not cold enough to kill you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  There was a long pause. “I guess I don’t.”

  “Idiot…” she muttered.

  They’d been getting along well, considering that they’d been complete strangers forty-eight hours ago. They’d been discussing various plans, and maybe some hope had begun to creep into them. They’d found that they made plans well together, and that it was easy to bounce ideas off one another. There was plenty that they didn’t know, but speculating wasn’t the worst thing they could do. They’d been able to talk things through without letting the conversation dissolve into pointless arguing.

  Things had been going well through the first couple hours of the hike. But then the walk had gone on and on, with the mountains in the distance always appearing as far away as they had at the beginning.

  The snow had gotten deeper, the weather colder, and the wind stronger.

  It had been hard going. And for one reason or another, their moods had begun to deteriorate. Hope had seemed to vanish. Then they’d begun to argue. He’d blamed her, and she’d blamed him. In the end, they just pressed on. But the going had only gotten worse.

  Meg lay there, her body shivering more violently as the minutes passed. She closed her eyes, squeezing them as tight as she could, hoping that she could somehow will the events of the last couple days completely away, as if it had never happened at all.

  But, of course, that was just a fantasy.

  Still, she screwed her eyes even tighter, hoping that some dream-like state would begin to take over. Normally, when she lay in bed at night, she had interesting, if sleepy, thoughts as she drifted off.

  But tonight, nothing came to mind. Nothing but worry and terror. Her body had rarely felt as exhausted as it did now, but she felt jittery and awake, along with the intense shivering due to the temperature. Her heart was thudding along at a strange, unrecognizable pace. She felt almost as if she’d drunk far too much coffee and then gone an hour without eating or drinking anything.

  “You asleep?” came James’s voice.

  “Of course not, idiot,” she snapped.

  “Give me a break, won’t you?”

  “Not with stupid questions like that.”

  “Look, we’ve got to stop arguing.”

  “I’m not arguing,” she protested, all the while knowing that it wasn’t true. And what was more, a little part of her was saying, “Anyway, it’s not my fault, is it?”r />
  “Look,” said James. In the dark, she heard some rustling, as if he were perhaps propping up on one elbow in his sleeping bag. “It’s not like you’re hurting my feelings here… that’s not why I’m talking about this… and don’t get me wrong, it’s as much my fault as it is yours… maybe more.”

  “You got that right,” she muttered under her breath, her teeth gnashing against each other from the intensity of the chattering.

  “What’s that?” he said. There was a long pause, in which she didn’t answer. “Never mind,” he said. “We’ve got to get through this. We’re fighting like an old married couple… and, here’s the thing... maybe the fighting is distracting us from the sober reality that these might be some of our last hours. And here’s the other thing, this fighting might really get us killed.”

  The words really hit home, and she knew he was right. If they were fighting, arguing, quibbling, or whatever they wanted to call it, snapping at each other until they were both annoyed and angry, they might easily miss something important. They might easily miss seeing something that they needed to see. They’d be prone to taking more wrong turns, potentially. They might get lost and wind up dead in some snowbank.

  They’d known ahead of time that the weather out here in the Berkshires could be dramatically different than back around Holyoke and Northampton, but it had been a shock at times to encounter several feet of snow, all of which they’d had to wade through. The going was slow, cold, and exhausting.

  James wasn’t in good shape, having taken a severe beating a couple days ago. He’d made it, but his complaining about his injuries had become incessant, and at times Meg had wondered whether she’d made the right choice in teaming up with him.

  Well, she thought, they could always part ways if things didn’t work out. And anyway, it was more likely that one or both of them would die somehow before long. There were, it seemed, too many ways to die. Violence. Accidents. Hypothermia. Starvation. Dehydration.

  And there weren’t that many ways to live. Before the EMP, it had seemed as if death was something remote, something that happened to the very old or the very unlucky. But now that the veneer of modern life had been stripped violently away from them, the bare requirements of life were staring them in the face. And the result was brutal. A brutal confrontation with just how much it really took to stay alive.

  To simply not die, one needed what seemed like an insurmountable amount of conditions and requirements to be met, and situations to be favorable. The temperature needed to be just so or else a human being would die. Humans hadn’t evolved in these cold conditions, and it was only with the use of their brains that they’d managed to survive here. But the problem now was that these adaptations weren’t evolutionary in the traditional sense. Nothing had fundamentally changed about man except the tools and equipment he had access to. So if something went wrong with the heating system, it wasn’t as if man had feathers or fur to keep him warm in this climate. No, the more likely result was that he would die.

  For millennia man had walked the fine line between life and death. It was only very recently that this line had become obscured, harder to see. It was only recently that people had become soft and cushy, and generally unaware of the constant danger and peril they could face if things didn’t go just right.

  “What do we do?” she said.

  “We keep going,” came James’s voice, sounding more tired and weak than she was used to hearing. She realized the hiking and the cold might have taken more out of him than her, considering his injuries.

  “All right,” she said. “You’re right. We might die if we try to sleep here. The best-case scenario is that we lie awake all night freezing our asses off, growing weaker…”

  “So a truce?” he said.

  “A truce?”

  “I mean, are we going to agree to try to get along? Like I suggested?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Fine. I can’t promise to always be pleasant though.”

  “Neither can I, but the least we can do is try not to sabotage ourselves. We’re a team. There’s a reason we decided to team up, right?”

  “Yeah, there’s strength in numbers. Greater chance to survive and all that.”

  “And I know you must sometimes be regretting teaming up with me…” He let the words hang in the air for a moment. “...and that’s fine. The thing is, while it still seems advantageous for us to work together, travel together, fight together, survive together, we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the team unit functioning well. If we don’t, if we waste our time and energy squabbling over nothing, then we might as well just split up right now.”

  There was a long pause as Meg thought it over.

  Eventually, she realized he was right.

  “Fine,” she said. “We’re in agreement. We’ll work together as best we can. If we can’t, or if circumstances change, we’ll go our separate ways.”

  “Right.”

  “Sounds good. Now let’s get the hell out of here. The only way we’re going to be remotely warm without a fire is if we keep walking.”

  “You’re right, but just another minute here. I feel like I got run over by a truck, and I don’t relish the idea of getting up off this floor, even though I know it’s what we desperately need to do.”

  Suddenly, there was a noise outside. Or, at least, Meg thought she heard something outside. It sounded like a branch breaking, snapping in two, perhaps underneath a heavy footstep.

  Then she heard something else.

  Or at least she thought she did.

  But James was still talking, making it hard, if not impossible, to listen to the sounds.

  “Shut up,” she snapped.

  “Hey!” snarled James. “I thought we just agreed to go easy on each other. What was the point of all that?”

  “Shut up!” she hissed. “I think I heard something.”

  Her eyes adjusted to the darkness enough to see shock come over James’s face as he fell silent.

  She fell silent as well, and they waited there in the silence.

  Several seconds passed. Nothing.

  She heard nothing but her heart pounding in her chest, nothing but James’s raspy breathing as his lungs sucked in the frigid air, trying desperately to provide his body with oxygen despite their injured state.

  More seconds passed. No noise, except for an owl hooting far off in the distance.

  Nothing

  There was that kind of silence that seems to hang in the air only when there’s a thick covering of snow on the ground, as well as snow falling from the sky. Maybe it had started snowing since they’d entered the shed. She didn’t know. There were no windows in the little wooden hovel full of old, broken-down yard work equipment.

  She glanced over at James, who was looking at her. His eyes were wide and his head was hovering above the ground so that both ears were capable of picking up whatever slight sound there was out there.

  A full minute passed. Nothing. No sound.

  Then another minute.

  “Well,” James started to say. “I guess…”

  But just as he spoke, she heard the sound again. She heard it as clear as day.

  Her hand was already on her gun.

  Someone was out there.

  She didn’t know who.

  And she didn’t know what they wanted.

  But one thing was for sure, and that was that whoever was out there was close enough to have heard them.

  Whoever was out there knew that there was someone in this shed.

  The best-case scenario was that whoever was out there was harmless. But what were the chances of that?

  Not good. Not these days.

  2

  Barb

  Barb stood there, out in the snow, shivering. She had on her big parka, the one she always took with her on her “winter work vacations” as she called them.

  She was dressed practically for the weather, with thick woolen socks, and a thick wool shirt that had belonged to her late father
. As he’d always said, “Cotton kills.” Barb was well aware that hypothermia was a serious threat in these parts, as well as elsewhere. She’d spent some time reading the statistics and knew that most people who died alone in the outdoors died from hypothermia. Sure, there were plenty of fatalities from other causes, like dehydration, the odd lightning strike or two, accidents, and so on. But the most common thing? Definitely hypothermia settling in on an unprepared day hiker.

  The temperature now was in the low 20s and with the windchill it felt a lot colder. Barb knew that people could die from exposure when the temperature was as high as the low 70s if they’d gotten wet. That’s why “cotton kills” really was true, since once wet, cotton not only failed to provide warmth, but it actually made you colder than if you weren’t wearing it. It had something to do with the rate of evaporation and the amount of water that cotton could absorb.

  The gist of it was that cotton could absorb many times its own weight in water.

  Despite Barb’s practical clothes, she was still shivering as she stood there. And that was because it was one thing to step out from a comfortably heated house into 20-degree weather, but it was quite another to be inside a completely unheated house for two full days, freezing, shivering, teeth chattering, and then step out into the even colder outdoors where the wind and snow were blowing like they never had.

  The snow had started falling again, adding to the already thick ground cover. The snow, about an hour ago, had been nothing but light flurries, but it had quickly become much more than that, with the rate of snowfall quickly approaching what seemed like blizzard levels.

  Of course, with the power out and the crank-powered radio picking up absolutely nothing, there was simply no way to know whether a blizzard was coming through, or whether this was just an hour or so of unusually intense snowfall. In her parents’ time, and before that, people had known, at least to some extent, how to read the weather. They’d known what to make of a certain color in the sky, and they’d known what clouds of a certain shape and density meant in terms of the coming weather patterns.