by Nick Randall
For Family
A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller
Nick Randall
© 2018
Nick Randall Copyright © 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.
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Part I: Defending The Homestead
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part II: A Day To Fight
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part I - Defending The Homestead
Chapter 1
“You’ve been gone for over four hours,” Josie Foster said in a displeased tone, nervously running a hand through her wavy brown hair and putting her hands on her hips.
She walked over to the shed where her husband, Roy Foster, kept their Ford F-150 truck and aging Land Rover SUV parked. He looked at her as he lifted two red gas cans and a garbage bag filled with items into the bed of the truck, a deeply furrowed brow visible under the visor of a camouflage military cap, and shook his head: something had him unsettled. A combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and a steadfast father and survivalist, it was rare to see him this way.
“Town’s deserted,” Roy spoke solemnly. “Hard to tell, it being a single intersection with a gas station, little general store, and a diner. But it is deserted all the same.”
Roy handed the gas cans over to Josie. She buckled slightly under the weight, while he then emptied out the contents of the garbage bag: lots of canned goods, jars, medicine, water bottles, ammunition, tarps, and a few camping supplies. Roy noticed her speculative gaze.
“We can’t afford all this, Roy. What’d you grab all it for anyway? Don’t we have enough already in that bunker of yours?”
“I just took it,” Roy remarked with a shrug.
“You stole all this from Wilson’s store?!” Josie exclaimed, putting down the gas cans and tilting her head, gesturing at the bed of supplies. “You’re gonna get yourself arrested, or worse, killed!”
“The power’s been out for three days,” Roy said, facing her and his expression changing from one of perplexed concern to stern resolution. “We don’t get any calls from the power company, or emergency services, cars aren’t running, the phones aren’t working anyway, and none of the neighbors drop by. In fact, I just drove the the nearest homesteads and everybody is gone.”
Josie imagined that this was the same voice he used on his soldiers when his unit was in trouble.
He pointed down the road, the only road leading to the house.
“I walked five miles into town,” he continued. “There is nobody out here, it’s all empty farm houses and abandoned vehicles on the side of the road. Now, I don’t know what’s going on, but we’d best be prepared to hold our own here until we do find out, one way or another.”
Josie looked at her husband and shook her head, and couldn’t help but smile a little. He was so ready for the world to end, or the country to fall or something like that, and he was always ready for a fight. Not that she didn’t take him seriously, she just didn’t take the chances of it happening seriously. At least, until a few days ago. She heaved her shoulders and sighed.
“So what do you think it is?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “But with no power, no internet, and no working electronics or vehicles…I think it can only be one thing.”
“You mean…an EMP?” she asked.
Roy looked at her.
“We should build some fortifications, beef up that fence and board up the windows,” he said. “Something big is going on out there, and if there isn’t any infrastructure, there’s nothing to protect us from anybody who might want to take what’s ours.”
Josie bent over to pick up the gas cans again, and walked around the side of the house and placed them by the generator. Roy hefted the supplies from the truck bed and walked to the front door, stepping onto their small covered patio and through the door.
Their property was relatively flat terrain: a forest of tall pines surrounded them on three sides, with the treeline ending about 150 yards from their property fence. Between the treeline and their fence were open fields of faded white wild grass and scattered sage brush, all gently sloping downward to their yard.
The only road in and out of the property led straight to the front gate of the wire fence, which created a perimeter about 40 yards from the house on all sides.
Inside the fence was a simple gravel road, and undeveloped patches of dirt. Josie had planted a few gardens along the front of the house, tomatoes and onions and such. She’d wanted to turn the whole yard into subsistence gardening one day.
The house was a two story with a kitchen, den, two bathrooms, and two bedrooms, one of which was theirs and the other that belonged to Alex, their daughter. The kitchen and den were decorated with family photos: Roy and Josie at their wedding, Roy in full military uniform, a frame of various military medals and awards, Roy and Josie at the birth of their daughter, the three of them standing in front of their newly purchased home, a grinning blonde Alex on her 10th birthday. Josie walked in behind Roy, supplies in hand.
“Those go in the bunker,” he said.
She nodde
d, and moved past the dinner table that sat on the edge of the kitchen where he dropped the groceries, and opened the door to the bunker that descended below the house. The bare wooden staircase creaked; it joined up with bare wooden frames sitting against gray sheet rock and bare cement floors.
Tall shelves of home-canned goods, home-jarred goods like pickled fish and eggs and onions, sealed bags of smoked meats and jerky, seeds and grains, dried fruit and vegetables, candles, bolts upon bolts of leather and cloth and sewing equipment; all Josie’s work. She may never have been the fighting type like her husband, but she knew how to homestead and make the most of their limited resources.
The food stores in this bunker alone could last them almost a year. It started out as a hobby, and when she and Roy had their daughter and bought this house, the two sides of their “prepper” nature came together and she was motivated by him to make her hobby a more industrious pursuit than just gifting people homemade marmalade on holidays. As anxious as she was for the situation and her family, looking around, she was grateful for all her work in the years past. However long they were in the dark, at least they would eat well and be warm.
On the far side of the bunker, the wall was lined with shelves of tools, scraps, empty ammunition casings, gun parts, and books on wilderness survival, war fighting, and military history. A small gun safe, a shelf of ammunition, a reloading bench, and several work benches all sat against the wall on the far side. The space was illuminated by a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Next to the work space, in a new door frame, was the hatch to their bunker.
Josie shivered as she went over to the hatch; no electricity meant the air down here stayed at about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, warm enough not to be dangerous but it still took some getting used to. She pulled open the solid steel door and grabbed the flashlight off the handle, clicking it on and shining it into the darkness.
The bunker had been Roy’s idea. It took a fair chunk out of their savings, but now they had even more room for storage, and a little bunkhouse with an air filtration system and battery-operated lights. Josie didn’t stop to think about why they might need to lock themselves inside, as she passed more shelves of military MREs, freeze-dried and dehydrated everything, whole crates of medical supplies and ammunition and batteries, water purification solutions, everything they’d need to survive another several years without any economic infrastructure supporting them. Josie emerged from the basement to the sound of Roy and Alex chatting in her room.
“Where did everyone go, dad?” Alex asked, clearly sounding a little worried. “Is everyone at school gone, too?”
“I didn’t go to your school, honey, and I don’t know where everyone went. Maybe everyone in town were just at a party, or a town meeting.”
Josie walked into the room and interrupted him: “Bedtime, sweetie! Come on, go brush your teeth!” she said urgently, clapping her hands.
As Alex rolled her eyes and trotted off to the bathroom, Josie walked over to her husband who was sitting on the edge of their daughter’s bed, a stuffed white rabbit in his hands. She crossed her arms and looked at him, whispering loudly.
“What are you thinking, telling her there was nobody in town?” Josie asked, squinting at Roy, who stood up and whispered back close to her.
“She’s gonna figure out sooner or later that something’s not right, we have to let her know at some point.”
“I know, but not now…”
“Why not? She’s not two, she’s ten, and if you haven’t noticed, she’s really smart.”
“I have noticed, Roy, I’m the one who stays up with her all night doing homework and helping her with her projects, while you’re down in that basement, out in the shed or at your bench working on God knows what. Guess we just got into the habit, with you being gone for months and years at a time.”
“Gone? You mean on deployment, getting shot at and helping stop a regime of fanatics and child-killers?”
“Well, while you were out there stopping those child killers, your own child was growing up without you. I love you, Roy, and I’m proud of you for serving, but you promised me you wouldn’t re-enlist after we had her, and you broke that promise. You’ve only been home for two full years now. Sometimes I think you loved the military more than you love us.” Josie said.
Roy stepped back and put his hands in his pockets, looking from the ground to her to the bed and back. He nodded silently, head bobbing up and down, tight-lipped and agitated. She wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with her, or was trying not to get mad. Her gaze softened.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just, I’m scared. And I’m worried about what we’re gonna do when her insulin runs out. We’ve only got that small fridge for it, and if the generator runs out then we’ve got two weeks before it’s no good.”
“I know you’re scared…” he said, stepping back over to her and taking her hands in his. “I’m gonna protect us, don’t you worry. I learned a lot of things during my time in Afghanistan, and if any assholes try to break in and hurt you, or our daughter, or take anything from us, they’ll pay.”
“You talk like the world is already over, that there’s nobody coming back for us…”
“We have to assume that there is nobody, that we’re on our own. We don’t even know what happened, all we know is what we can see, and what I see is a basement full of supplies, my wife, my daughter, and a big silent nothing outside… and that’s as far as I have to look. As far as we have to look.”
Josie stayed quiet, looking into his eyes and wondering why it seemed like he was secretly excited about the prospect. He was a solitary man, and though she had her friends and relatives back home, when she moved out here with him, they became a solitary family. It only just now occurred to her that there might be a line between simply wanting your autonomy and being actively hostile to the rest of the world, and it sounded like her husband was flirting with that line, even itching to cross it.
“We’ll start improving our defenses first thing tomorrow morning. Tell Alex whatever you have to, but we need to make this place easier to protect.”
“Tell me what, dad?” Alex said, peaking her head around the corner.
Roy looked over and smiled, grabbed the rabbit from the bed, and offered it to her.
“Tell you that you’re going to help Mom and Dad do some work on the house tomorrow. In case any bad guys come.” Roy said, ignoring it when Josie clenched his hand for what he said. Alex walked over, took her rabbit, and the three of them held each other in the dim candlelight of the room.
Chapter 2
Roy brought down the sledgehammer onto another fence post, slamming it into the ground with a shudder.
He stretched, grunted, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. His shirt was soaked through, and hands were shaking as he looked around with satisfaction.
Josie nodded and smiled, panting from all the work, and surveying the new installments. With stockpiles from the shed, and what Roy could find in town, they had built a secondary interior fence that stood four feet tall, as tall as the original.
The original perimeter was made of wooden posts and four levels of barbed wire; the secondary perimeter fence was built ten feet inside the original and posted with green fencing stakes. Both had been strung with additional barbed wire for defense.
Roy had also constructed two makeshift gates out of some wood and metal pipes. They would have to be physically dragged to the side in order to let themselves into and out of the yard, but they locked into place with some simple boards that slid into place through the framework across the back and latched onto the fence posts.
“The gates are a weak spot,” Roy scrutinized. “I wonder if our neighbors would mind if I repurposed a couple of theirs.”
They were on the seventh day with no power except what their small generator gave them, and no word from the outside. The weather was getting colder, somehow, too. And now she was watching her husband turn their home into a fortress. She glanced over to the ho
use.
The windows were boarded up, with only a six-inch horizontal space across the middle so they could see and Roy could shoot out at the fence. The back and front door had been reinforced with more wood panels and some extra security bolts. He’d set up tripwires with an alarm system along the fence. The idea, he said, was for intruders to be deterred by the fence, or at least delayed on the fence long enough for him to shoot at them.
If they figured out that the gate was the weakest spot, which wouldn’t be hard to determine, they’d have to get around it, over it, or through it, and all the while Roy would be shooting at them with military hardware. All Josie had to do was make sure Alex was safely downstairs, and act as a lookout or spotter for Roy.
