Whatever.
He just needed to get on with it.
Suddenly, though, an idea occurred to him.
He acted immediately, throwing himself down onto the freezing ground, right onto his belly, trying to get himself as flat as possible.
He had to crane his neck and head up, but the idea worked, and now he was able to get a view from underneath his squad car.
It wasn’t a great view.
But it was a view.
And he figured that if there was a pair of feet and ankles sneaking along, he’d be able to see them.
So they were hanging back?
What were they doing? Waiting for him to expose himself? Trying to retreat themselves?
What was his goal?
Focusing on his breathing, he tried to step outside the situation, trying to get a bird’s-eye view of things.
His body was all keyed up, all ready to fight. But his body might betray him. It might make him rush headlong into a situation that he wasn’t ready for.
What did his mind say? His mind, a little calmer than his body, said that he was outnumbered and that he needed to get the hell out of there. If he could have called for backup, it would have been one thing.
But what was he playing at? Who did he think he was? Clint Eastwood?
He’d do more good for the community by reporting this to the station and staying alive for the next gunfight.
It didn’t do the community any good if he died here, riddled with bullets, bleeding out on the freezing pavement.
OK. So he’d get out. He’d established that finally. He’d fought against his pounding heart and his shaky, jittery body. He’d managed to get a calm view of the situation.
But how would he get out of here?
He couldn’t just crawl back in the car and drive away, could he?
Well, what would they do?
He needed to think this through carefully.
He couldn’t rush into it.
But at the same time, he desperately needed to act quickly. The more time he spent here, the more likely he was to die.
In his mind’s eye, he imagined the possibilities. Eventually, after little more than thirty harried seconds, he came to the conclusion that he’d have to engage the enemy, then flee.
What that meant was that he’d open fire as he got into the driver’s seat. Then with the gun out the window, he’d back up, while trying to shoot.
He knew that once his hand was on the wheel, once his foot was on the gas, there was little likelihood he’d be able to hit anyone. But it was still worth it. The mere sound of the gun discharging would hopefully keep the enemies hidden, trying to escape the rounds.
Of course, it was only guesswork.
Practice would be something different.
Hopefully he’d live through it.
No point in delaying any longer.
He sprang up, intentionally throwing his body into action before he could decide that he didn’t want to do it. Fortunately or unfortunately, this worked well, and before he knew it, he’d jumped up and launched his body into the driver’s seat.
Only a fraction of his shoulder was exposed.
And his plan was already in shambles.
He’d meant to fire first. Not launch his body first.
But that was the way it had gone.
And in that seemingly split-second moment where his shoulder was exposed, a gun had discharged.
Brandon didn’t realize he’d been hit until he was squarely in the driver’s seat.
The pain hadn’t quite hit yet. Or maybe it had. He wasn’t really sure. Whatever the case, something wasn’t registering.
The world was moving jerkily and strangely. A small spot of blood appeared on his uniform.
He went to move his arm, but it didn’t respond. So twisting himself around, he managed to get his sidearm pointed in the right direction with just his right arm.
He squinted, taking a full second to aim, which felt like an eternity, then he pulled the trigger.
His body position was weird. Very weird.
But he pulled the trigger a second time. Then a third time. All in rapid succession.
He didn’t wait. He didn’t know if he’d hit anything.
More rounds. The pop of handguns rang out through the frozen air.
With his left arm effectively dead, Brandon moved rapidly, tossing the sidearm on the passenger seat, using his now free right arm to engage the shifter. His foot, meanwhile, slammed onto the accelerator.
A second later, the car was rocketing backward.
Through the dirty windshield, stained with the salt from the road, he finally caught a good glimpse of one of the enemies. He was a middle-aged man. Nondescript. Nothing special or unusual about him. He wasn’t covered in tattoos. He didn’t look evil. In fact, if he’d been wearing a uniform, it would have been easy to imagine him as another officer, another member of the force.
But he wasn’t. He was a criminal. A wannabe cop killer.
You couldn’t always judge a man based on his appearance. Sometimes you could. Not always, though.
This guy had close-cropped hair. Clean-shaven. A stern look in his eyes.
Then it was all over as Brandon lost sight of him. The moment was over.
A bullet smashed into his windshield, sending a spiderweb of cracked lines every which way, severely limiting Brandon’s visibility.
“Five more seconds,” muttered Brandon to himself. “Come on… Come on…”
It took all his willpower to not swing the wheel around, to not try to get the car going the other way. It seemed as if any moment he might smash into something, getting himself killed one way or another, whether from the accident or the ensuing gunshots. But he knew that he needed to be far enough away before he swung the wheel. He knew he needed to be out of range.
His head wouldn’t spin around. The gunshot wound was limiting his mobility more severely than he’d thought. It wasn’t just his arm that was affected.
Whatever.
He kept the wheel straight, counting down to himself.
One one thousand.
Two one thousand.
Another bullet slammed into the windshield. More lines. More cracks. Harder to see. Not that it mattered right now.
Three one thousand.
Four one thousand.
He wanted to swing the wheel. Slam on the brakes.
He held off for one more count.
Then he did it, swinging the wheel hard and fast, slamming his foot as hard as he could against the brake. Just like he’d practiced in the academy.
And the practice paid off. He’d done the maneuver so many times that now, despite the injury, despite the stress and the intensity, everything worked just the way it should.
Before he knew it, he was facing the other way, shifting the car into drive, slamming on the gas, and rocketing away. The car’s engine was a good one. Plenty of acceleration.
Behind him, he heard some light pops. A handgun discharging.
No threat to him, though.
He’d timed it perfectly. He was safely out of range.
He glanced only once in the rearview mirror. The two vehicles sat there, a couple of bodies around.
He didn’t know if he’d hit anyone or not.
Glancing down to his left, he saw that the small spot of blood had grown considerably. Now, it seemed as if his entire arm was soaked in blood. And not only his arm, but his chest as well.
His shoulder felt weird. And on top of that, the pain had started. It was intense, stabbing, pumping pain.
His heart was beating strangely, as if it were galloping along unsteadily.
His vision, he suddenly noticed, had been reduced from the normal tunnel vision to an extreme sort of tunnel vision. He could barely see anything, almost as if he were looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything seemed distorted, rounded, and simply strange.
The windshield was intensely cracked. He had to lean do
wn to the left in order to look through the bottom-most segment. There happened to be fewer cracks there and it was almost like looking through a regular, unbroken windshield.
Reflexively, he reached for his radio.
Of course, with only one hand on the wheel, that wasn’t such a great idea, and the car immediately started swerving to the right.
Remembering that the radio was dead anyway, he grabbed the wheel again.
The road in front of him was empty. There were no houses in sight. No buildings. Just nothing but barren, desolate snow as far as he could see, with an intense gray sky that hung down far too low.
Glancing at his shoulder again, he saw even more blood this time. His shirt had soaked up all it could.
Something was wrong.
What was it?
His thinking was cloudy. He felt intensely foggy.
His brain wasn’t working right.
He was losing too much blood. He realized that much at least.
But what should he do?
The wound was bleeding more than he’d have expected it to. And at the same time, the pain somehow wasn’t as bad as he would have expected.
Was he going to go into shock?
With the placement of the wound, he didn’t know how he could reduce the bleeding himself. A tourniquet would be difficult to apply, given the location of the injury.
He was far from his home. He probably wouldn’t make it if he tried to head to his wife. And she had no special training in tending to gunshot wounds.
What about the hospital? It was far away, far outside of North Adams. At least an hour drive. He’d never make it.
The station was another forty-five minutes away. He could try.
But he didn’t think it would work.
But what choice did he have? It was his best bet.
The gas pedal was already floored. The engine was roaring as the battered squad car raced down the desolate road.
A minute passed.
Then another.
He was getting weaker.
But he kept going, somehow keeping his right hand on the wheel. But it was becoming difficult, as if his muscles were filled with lead, as if his arm was impossibly heavy.
A glance in the rearview mirror told him no one was following him. That was good, in the sense that he wasn’t about to get shot at again.
But that didn’t mean he would live.
If he lost consciousness now while driving, he’d crash into the snow somewhere. If no one found him, then he’d likely die there. He didn’t see how he’d live through that.
And the chances of someone finding him? Slim. Even during normal times, when society was running and people were driving to and from work, this particular road was very lightly traveled.
“Now what’s that?” he muttered to himself, his voice sounding strange, as if it were coming from far, far away. He sounded weak. He was weak. “Is that smoke? Smoke?”
A half minute later, he was closer to the smoke.
If he wasn’t imagining things, then there had to be people there. Or at the very least, he hoped there were people there.
And he hoped they’d be good people. People who’d help him.
Where was the smoke coming from? He couldn’t see any buildings. He couldn’t see any small roads that led off to the east, where the smoke was coming from. Instead, it seemed to be rising up from some desolate plane of pure snow. But that wasn’t possible.
What should he do? Continue on, hoping to find the cross street?
What if he didn’t find it in time? What if he passed out before then?
He didn’t want to look at his arm again. But it was throbbing in pain, and he could feel the slickness of the blood on his skin.
Acting swiftly and impulsively, Brandon let his body make the decision for him.
He didn’t have time to find the cross street, if there even was one.
He swung the wheel hard, sending the squad car plummeting off the road and right into the snow.
Would it make it across the large open expanse of thick, deep snow?
His body shook with the impact.
The tires spun wildly.
The engine roared.
The car bucked like a bronco.
9
Meg
“What’s the problem with a little smoke? We’ve got to stay warm.”
“Are you crazy?” said Meg. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
“I thought I was doing us all a favor.”
“I was just thrilled to have some warmth in here!” said Barb.
Meg gave both of them a piercing glare, her mouth tangled up into an intense scowl.
“Come on, help me put this out.”
“Put it out?” whined James.
Meg had had enough. She shoved him. Hard, too.
He fell backward, losing his balance immediately, falling heavily onto his butt. “Hey!”
“I thought you were different,” she said, looking down at him. “I didn’t think you were like this… so…”
She didn’t have the words. She just turned around in disgust.
“Hey, what’s your problem?” said Barb, appearing next to her. “I know we just met… but I really don’t like the way you’re treating your friend here.”
“He and I basically just met too,” said Meg. “Now help me put out the fire. Let’s get some snow. No point in wasting water. Do you have a shovel?”
“Put out the fire?” said Barb, her jaw dropping. “Why on earth would we do that?”
“It’s going to attract attention,” said Meg. “And we don’t want attention.”
“Well, look here. This is my house and I want a fire. I don’t want to freeze to death.”
“We’re not going to freeze to death,” said Meg. “Not if we take proper precautions, stay indoors, and stay close together.”
“I don’t want to stay close to you,” said James, finally managing to get to his feet. “Look at you, attacking an injured man.”
“You’re fine,” snarled Meg.
She was annoyed. Angry.
And she had good reason to be.
“Don’t be so upset,” said Barb. “Let’s all try to calm down. Now when I was out in the field… we used to have a saying that…”
Meg raised her hand, and Barb fell silent. “Look,” said Meg. “You seem like a nice person, Barb. You seem practical. But you’re right. We just met. We all just met. We’re effectively strangers. But the thing is, we’re in this together now, at least for the moment. We’ve got to help each other. We’ve got to consult each other before we make big decisions.”
“Starting a fire isn’t exactly a big decision… I would have had one going if it hadn’t been for the chimney.”
James started to speak too, but he only got a couple syllables out.
Meg raised her hand again. Everyone fell silent.
They seemed to recognize that she was the leader. Whatever that meant. Or they recognized that she was, at the very least, a tough cookie, in the sense that she’d give them hell if she didn’t like what they were doing.
She wanted to talk. And they let her.
“It is a big decision,” said Meg, launching into a truncated explanation of why it was so dangerous to have smoke rising up to the sky, about why it was so dangerous to have actual smoke signals rising from their current location. There were bad people out there, people who’d do whatever they could to take the little that Barb, Meg, and James had.
They were nodding along with her, as if they understood.
“Now,” said Meg. “Barb, like I was saying, you seem practical. I’d like to team up with you. And I don’t want to lie, your house here has a lot to do with that. But do you want to team up with us? You invited us in, but there’s no time for a polite and vague decision… there’s no time for uncertainty… this isn’t a party or a dinner invitation where we’re guests who are overstaying our welcome. This is a survival situation. All bets are off when it comes to politeness. So in
the future I’m not going to apologize for being short or calling it like I see it…. we should try to be civil to each other, but there’s no need to take things to extreme lengths…. so, Barb, what’s it going to be?”
Barb looked uncomfortable, shifting on her feet a little. Then something seemed to take over her and as she spoke, her body language changed. It almost seemed as though she made a transformation between a sort of unsure woman who didn’t want to offend, to someone else entirely, a woman who knew what she wanted, who wasn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers. “Look,” she said. “Maybe sometimes I seem like I don’t know what’s what. That’s how I am when I’m on vacation. But I’ve been traveling the world for years. I’ve been in war zones. I’ve interviewed pirates. I’ve been kidnapped. I’ve been tortured. It’s a miracle I’m alive after what I’ve been through, except that it’s not… I’m alive because I was able to keep a calm head… I’ve learned from experience that those who panic wind up dead.”
“I’m not panicking,” said Meg. “I’m trying to be realistic.”
“Well,” said Barb. “I’m not yet convinced that this is as serious of a calamity as you’re saying… I’ve been in plenty of bad situations and this just doesn’t have the feel of a whole society crumbling apart… and I’ve actually been in plenty of places where nations literally crumbled underneath me.”
“You haven’t seen what we’ve seen, though,” said Meg. “You haven’t seen the chaos erupt from the stopped traffic…. you haven’t seen your neighbors kill your father…. you haven’t seen…”
“True,” said Barb, eyeing her carefully, and with scrutiny. She seemed almost like a different woman. “That’s all true. I’ve been out here, tucked away from the world.”
“The thing is,” said Meg. “Nowhere, no matter how remote, is going to be safe for long. The population of this country is largely concentrated in cities…. and the cities are going to be the worst places for survival…. everyone will realize that and flee the cities…. it’s like crabs in a bucket… the strongest will get out of the city… and they might very well make it out this far, looking for exactly the same thing we’re looking for…”
Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy Page 6
