by Nick Randall
Ben looked back up at her, and remained silent. She couldn’t read his expression, she was so exhausted from the past few weeks she couldn’t even think straight.
They continued to stare at each other, a silent stalemate, neither one conceding trust or showing any sign of blinking.
Then, the air began to stir, and the sound of muffled shouting came from above the ground as well as outside the bunker door.
Josie glanced up at the ceiling. Ben turned his head and looked too. The voices sounded panicked and confused, all at once.
Something wasn’t right.
That’s when they heard the unmistakable sound of helicopters in the distance and steadily growing louder.
“Get up,” Josie said, gesturing to the stairs. “Slowly.”
Ben rose to his feet and kept his hands on his head.
“Josie, don’t go out there!” Roy said, struggling to bring himself to his feet.
“It could be help!” Josie responded defiantly.
“Then I’m coming with you,” Roy said.
“No, stay here,” Josie said defiantly. “You’re injured and someone needs to stay with Alex.”
She turned back to Ben.
“Walk upstairs, now,” she said, following close behind Ben but not too close.
Ben ascended, and paused at the door.
“Open the latches, and push it open. Slowly.”
As he opened the door, the smell of the burned out home reached her nose, and the sounds of the panicking marauders and helicopter chatter reached her ears.
She reached out and pushed Ben towards the bunker stairs. He walked, looking behind at her once in a while.
“Don’t look at me. Keep walking.”
As they exited the bunker, Josie clenched her jaw and fought back a fresh wave of tears: the stars shone clearly and brightly through what remained of her kitchen and den.
The framework still standing was charred, and part of the house were still burning slowly but surely. Yet, above the shouting and the howling of the wind and the crackling of the fires, Josie heard something else: the unmistakable tempo of helicopter rotors, and they were close.
She looked around and saw two military helicopters with giant red crosses on their sides circling a few hundred feet above the house with search lights.
The gang members were sprinting across the fields in all directions. Two of them, their arms full of stolen food and supplies, made it into the woods where they disappeared. The rest stood their ground and futilely fired their guns up at the choppers in the sky.
Fully automatic machine gun fire erupted from both of the choppers. The firing gang members stood no chance as they began to fall left and right upon being hit.
Ojo didn’t even waste his time shooting at the choppers. Instead, he simply abandoned his fellow comrades and bolted hard for the woods where he vanished upon reaching the treeline.
The three remaining gang members out in the open were now on their knees with their hands high in the air. The choppers held fire.
The spotlights of the helicopters illuminated the ruins of the house and the many corpses of the prison gang now littering the yard. Josie lowered the Beretta and Ben lowered his hands.
They both looked up at the helicopters, and then they looked at each other once more.
Part II - A Day To Fight
Chapter 1
“Ground your weapons and put your hands up!” the male voice coming from the helicopter’s loudspeaker was painfully loud.
Between that and the floodlight shining at her, Josie was temporarily paralyzed with fear.
“Ground your weapons!” the voice repeated, snapping Josie out of it.
She dropped the Beretta and put her hands up high.
The helicopter circled around to her right, which took the blinding beam of its spotlight out of her eyes. As the afterimage faded, she could see the second helicopter hovering over the fence around her property line. Its light was much more mobile, darting from place to place on the ground.
It took her a second to realize that the green streaks she could see reaching down from the choppers were tracers from the machine guns she could still hear firing.
In front of her, she could see the three remaining gang members also standing still with their hands in the air.
One of them was still holding onto his pistol. The voice in the loudspeaker was shouting for him to drop it. Josie saw him swing it to aim up at the helicopter.
Before she was aware she was doing it, some instinctual part at the back of Josie’s brain threw her body to the ground just as she heard a machine gun high above and slightly behind her open up.
The gang member only got one shot off before he was completely riddled from head to toe with bullets. He fell dead to the ground.
“Stay still!” somebody shouted into Josie’s ear.
She looked left to see Ben, the one man in the raiding party that didn’t seem hard and evil like the others. She could see the dark red blood leaking out of his leg. She remembered him saying something about being with a group of prisoners who had escaped after whatever it was had happened.
The helicopter above them started to descend and a male voice coming from within it boomed through a loudspeaker:
“Person on the right, roll slowly to the right! Person on the right, roll slowly to the right!”
It took Josie a second to realize that the person she was looking at was to her left.
“Person on the right, roll slowly to the right!”
I am the person on the right, Josie realized.
Very slowly, she rolled away from Ben as the helicopter kept descending and armed U.S. soldiers began to drop out and hit the ground.
She held still for a few seconds, and then there were several voices around her.
“Hold still!” Two soldiers in camouflage clothing and full sets of what Roy had called “battle rattle” ran between her and Ben.
Somebody else on her right dropped his weight on the small of her back, roughly grabbed one arm and twisted it behind her back. She felt something bite into her wrist. She was tempted to turn and shout at whoever it was behind her, but there was an M4 barrel frighteningly close to her temple.
“Hold still! Hold still!”
Her other arm was yanked back, and cuffed. Two hands made a rapid pass up her arms, down her body, checked her pockets, down her legs. A multi-tool Roy had given her years before was yanked out of its belt pouch and tossed carelessly aside.
She was rolled onto her back, wrenching her arms painfully in the process. The soldier straddling her quickly frisked the front of her body, shouted “Clear!” and stood up.
He and one other soldier grabbed her by the shoulders to stand her up and rushed her to the waiting helicopter. Somebody inside the aircraft was reaching out to pull her inside when she regained her thoughts.
“Roy, Alex!” she shouted. “Wait! My husband and daughter!”
By this time, she was inside the excruciatingly loud helicopter. Ben was on the floor next to her, and she felt it lift up off the ground.
It felt like an eternity before she got somebody to crouch down beside her and take off his headphones.
“My daughter and husband were in a bunker in the basement!”
She shouted as loud as she could. She had to repeat herself three times before she saw some comprehension dawn on the soldiers face.
He put his headphones back on and spoke into a microphone. There was a very short conversation, and he brought his mouth right up to her ear.
“Not enough fuel!” he shouted.
“We have to go back!” Josie yelled.
“No fuel! No fuel!” was all the soldier would say, waving his hands at her and shaking his head.
Awkwardly, Josie rolled onto her back and kicked herself towards one of the bulkheads in the helicopter. The solder who’d listened to her helped her into a sitting position.
He got up close to her ear again, and yelled.
“We…
location…fuel…marked…return…patrol…” disembodied words were all she was able to make out. She thought she could extract some meaning from them.
“Where are we going?!” she shouted when the soldier backed away from her ear.
“Camp!”
Josie did not like the sound of that. The book that Roy had given Alexandria, the one about what life was really like in Afghanistan, had descriptions of displaced person camps in it – DP camps the soldiers called them.
The tales of the corruption that happened in all of them, the black marketeering, the criminal activity that flourished under the noses of the inadequate security forces appalled her.
She wanted no part of being in such a place without Roy, but even more than that, she did not want Alex in such a place whether Roy was with them or not.
She tilted her head towards the soldier to get his attention again. He took off his headphones and got close to her. Josie shook her head and twisted around, trying to mime a writing motion with her cuffed hands.
They were starting to go numb from the constriction of whatever they’d bound her with. She looked over at the escaped prisoner and saw what looked like an extra-large zip tie binding his wrists behind his back. One of the soldiers was wrapping a bandage around the kid’s wounded leg
Josie tried again to mime a writing motion, tilting her chin towards a pen the soldier had in a sleeve pocket. He just shook his head and brought his ear right up to her mouth.
As much as Josie was terrified of bringing Alex with her into a DP camp, something else terrified her more. “My daughter, she’s diabetic! She needs insulin now!”
The soldier leaned back and shook his head.
“Daughter! Daughter!” Josie shouted.
The soldier grabbed his pen and produced a small notepad from a pocket somewhere. He scribbled on it, and showed Josie the word, “Daughter.”
Josie nodded, and the soldier leaned in again. A few more rounds of shout and write, and he had “Daughter. Diabetes. Insulin. Die.” in front of her. He nodded, and put his headphones back on, had another conversation through the microphone. He scribbled a message to her.
“Not enough fuel now. Drop you off. Return tomorrow.”
Josie shook her head and shouted, “NO!” The soldier held his hand out towards her, like a traffic cop signaling a motorist to stop, and he leaned back in his seat, looking out the window.
Josie could barely see the flashing strobe of the other helicopter out the window, and nothing else.
Chapter 2
“Josie!” Roy called from within the bunker.
There was no response, only the sound of the choppers running outside.
“Blackhawks,” Roy said, recognizing their unique chatter from his time in the military. “Blackhawks, Alex.”
She daughter looked over at him.
“Are we okay now, dad?” she asked.
“I think so. They’re Army or maybe Marines. They’ll help us.”
Alex went for the door to the bunker.
“Wait,” Roy said. “Wait for me.”
He started to stand up, but found himself still dizzy, maybe even dizzier than before he went down into the basement. He hoped he wasn’t suffering a bad concussion.
“Hurry!” Alex said.
“Help me up,” Roy said. “I need a hand.”
Alex walked up to him and immediately wrapped her arms around him, trying to lift her father, in his tactical vest loaded down with ammunition.
“No, no,” Roy said, as he guided her a few steps back and offered an arm. “Pull as hard as you can.”
Alex dug in her heels and leaned back, pulling as hard as she could. Roy got upright and almost overbalanced, catching himself on one of the bunker’s cabinets.
“I need to lean on you,” he said.
Alex stood next to him, dutifully offering a shoulder. They took two steps towards the bunker door when the sudden sound of gunfire broke the night.
“DOWN!” he shouted, recognizing at least two M60s and a SAW opening up, plus several pops that sounded distinctly like short-barreled M4s.
Hearing no rounds coming towards the bunker, but not wanting to go out into a hot situation completely unarmed, Roy pointed towards his AR-15. “Grab that.”
Alex had to help pull Roy to his feet again, and steady him as they left the bunker. By now, the gunfire and the loudspeakers had both gone silent.
Two helicopters were idling outside, and he could hear amplified voices shouting. Roy slung the rifle, and put one hand up, still needing the other on Alex’s shoulder to steady himself.
“Put your hands up, too,” he said.
They had just hit the bottom of the basement stairs when Roy heard the pitch of the helicopter rotors change. They were taking off.
His first instinct was to tell Alex to run up the stairs to get their attention, but if the crews had just been in a firefight, anything appearing suddenly out of nowhere was at risk of being shot, so he tamped that down.
“Come on,” he told Alex. “Steady and keep your hands up.”
They were way too slow, though. By the time they reached the top of the stairs, even with the roof of the house burnt away, all they could see of the helicopters were their marker strobes flashing in the distance.
“I’m sorry, dad,” Alex said. “I was too slow.”
Roy wrapped her up in his arms as she began to cry.
“No you weren’t, kiddo,” he told her. “They were shooting and we needed to wait for that to stop first. You didn’t do this.”
Josie, Roy thought. The helicopters never would have left if she had told them he and Alex were still in the bunker. Roy realized there was only one thing that could possibly mean.
He felt a wave of shock and grief start to well up inside of him, but he swallowed it, and fell back on that cold detachment he had learned in combat.
That separation of his feelings and emotions from his actions, that allowed him to focus on the mission at hand and keep moving forward even after seeing a soldier under his command, or worse, a true buddy, go down in front of him.
Function now, feel it later, was the mantra he had taught himself.
He looked at Alex as he had always looked at his soldiers – unless he was rock solid, they were all going to lose it.
“Hey,” Roy said, as calm as he could through the searing pain in his head.
He could tell he was slurring his words, another sign he was concussed, but there was nothing he could do for it.
“We got this, Alex. We’re good, OK?”
He took his thumbs and wiped the tears running down her cheeks.
The poor thing was exhausted. It had been a terribly long day and she’d been repeatedly traumatized by the level of violence that had gone on around her, and on a half-dose of insulin at that. As he crouched down on one knee before her, his forehead against hers, he could see numbness settling on her.
Now that everything around them was quiet for the first time in hours, nearly silent except for the quiet crackling of a few small fires that were still burning, and the distant noise of frogs at the stream that bordered their property, she was hitting the adrenaline crash and was going to go down fast.
“Why don’t you go down to bed, and let me take a look around,” he told Alex, and she slowly nodded her head. “Close the bunker door behind you, but don’t lock it.”
As she turned towards the stairs, he gave her a quick squeeze on her shoulder, and took his time standing back up. The dizziness was still on him, but didn’t seem to be getting any worse. His head had started pounding even harder, though.
Looking around the ruins of the den, he saw a metal coat tree that had been knocked over, and nothing else that looked even remotely useful as a cane. He stumbled over to it, twisting the pole to unscrew it from its base, and used that to hobble around.
Going out the empty space where the front door had once stood, and down the couple of concrete steps to the ground he saw nothing moving. In the pale
light of the half moon, and with his vision going fuzzy and double, he couldn’t make out much, but at least nothing was moving within a hundred feet or so.
Josie and that little punk that had wheedled his way into their bunker couldn’t have gotten far before the shooting had started, so he looked down at his feet. Nothing there. Roy started walking towards one end of the house’s remains, found nothing, and reversed direction. He passed the front steps, and ten feet beyond that, he saw a slight metallic glint on the ground.
He crouched down, and it was a Gerber multi-tool, the exact same kind Josie carried. He held it up to his eyes, but he was still having trouble focusing. It was a hard decision for him to make, but he had to know. He took his penlight out of a pocket of his tactical vest and turned it on.
JOSIE J FOSTER was engraved on one of the sides. He caught sight of something else in the thin beam of the flashlight. Another piece of metal a few feet away. He walked over to it.
A familiar looking Beretta 92FS 9mm pistol was in the grass. It was with even greater reluctance that he bent over to pick it up. It was an act of will to aim the penlight at the side of it and look at the serial number stamped on the side.
It was his. It was the gun she had pulled out of his holster after he’d been knocked senseless by the flash-bang. Wherever Josie was, she was unarmed.
He wanted to just slump to the ground, to just give it all up right then and there. His wife gone, the homestead they’d so carefully built looted and burnt out.
Barely enough medicine to keep his daughter alive for a couple more weeks, if he could keep it cool and if she could survive on half-doses. All of his careful preparations had come to naught, just a few weeks after the and EMP had brought civilization to a grinding halt. Years of preparation got him nothing. Nothing at all.
