by Nick Randall
He felt the emotions he had buried start rising to the surface again, and decided to fight back once more. He never gave up in combat, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to give up now.
He knew that with the concussion, if he fell asleep, he might not get back up. He couldn’t count on Alex to keep waking him up. She had dug down to the very bottom of her reserves.
Roy committed himself to keeping upright and moving until dawn. At dawn, if the symptoms of the concussion had started to subside, he’d consider giving himself a couple hours of sleep to reassess his situation.
He at least had a plan.
* * *
The five hours until first light felt like they had lasted five days. Roy had kept walking steadily around the burnt out remains of his home in an ever-widening spiral, evaluating everything he found. There were numerous rotting dead bodies littering his yard. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed over them. Crows were patiently circling overhead.
A few of the bodies still had body armor blazoned with the name of the prison about fifty miles down the road, but they were obviously prisoners, not guards. That matched up with the little bit of conversation he had caught between Josie and the young man she’d foolishly let into the bunker and followed up the stairs just as the helicopters arrived.
He was able to recover a few weapons from the fallen bodies, some 9mm and .45 caliber pistols, a revolver, and a couple of shotguns.
Mercifully, the separate garage hadn’t caught fire when the house burned, and the two vehicles inside looked undamaged. The Ford F-150 pickup was a 2002 and had been fried thanks to its electrical system that the EMP had made short work of, but the Land Rover SUV was a 1983 and Roy thought it should still be in working condition.
That was because the Land Rover was from the days when cars didn’t have sensitive electronics that could be fried out by an EMP, or that required functioning computers and a chest full of specialized tools to maintain. There was nothing on the Land Rover that couldn’t be fixed by the tools in his Roy’s toolbox. The thing was damned near indestructible, to boot.
Meanwhile, the hastily up-armored Dodge truck the invaders had driven up onto his property was a loss. The tires were flat, and barbed wire was hopelessly tangled up around the wheels and in the undercarriage.
Enough rounds had gone through it to have punctured the radiator, the alternator, and several other components under the hood. Judging by the number of larger caliber holes in the hood and top of the vehicle, Roy guessed one of the M60 gunners had lit it up from above.
By the time there was enough light in the sky for Roy to see color, his eyesight had cleared up and he was able to walk without leaning on the metal pole for balance.
He went back to the basement of the house, found a jar of Josie’s homemade applesauce that hadn’t been broken, and scarfed it down. A quick check on Alex showed that she was sleeping heavily, breathing shallow but steady.
He grabbed a second jar of applesauce and went back outside. Farther out on the perimeter of his property, he saw a few blood trails leading back the way the invaders had come from.
He followed one out as far as he dared, and found some torn cloth and tamped down grass. It looked a lot like somebody had stopped to rip apart their clothes to quickly bandage a wound and keep going.
At least two wounded still out there, Roy guessed by the blood trails. Who knows how many wounded whose trails he hadn’t found yet, and how many unwounded were out there? Roy knew there was no way he could rebuild anything on his own, with only Alex for help.
No way the two of them could mount an effective defense of what remained. He knew the best place to go next, if he had Josie with him.
One of his old Army buddies, Jon, had set up on the edge of a small city called Carleton around thirty miles away.
Unlike Roy, who had always intended to wait out an SHTF scenario out in the country, Jon had some crazy plan to set his doomsday prepping base in town.
If only he knew where Josie had ended up. He couldn’t imagine she’d have left without him and Alex, but he also couldn’t see any sign that she’d been taken by the invaders either.
What Roy knew for sure was that he needed to get himself and Alex somewhere safer to regroup. He went downstairs to wake Alex up and give her a shot of insulin.
Even though it hurt to do so, with the dwindling supply, he gave her a full dose. After the day she’d just had, he couldn’t bear to short her. While the two of them scraped up breakfast, Roy took out a notebook and started working out a message.
He had insisted on teaching Josie a simple code he’d picked up and used it to leave her a short message. Roy took a permanent marker and wrote the message for Josie on the door of the bunker, and on the wall inside.
“We’re going to find a friend of mine, who has a safer house than this one was,” Roy told Alex.
It hurt him to say it, but it was the only hope he had at the moment.
“If mom comes back here, she’ll see this message and know where to find us.”
Alex just nodded her head blankly at him. She was still looking completely numb, in addition to being tired from too many days on too little insulin and food.
After breakfast, Alex helped as much as she could to quickly load the Land Rover with as many MREs, boxes of the diabetic-friendly shelf-stable food, and other supplies from the bunker as they could manage.
He took all the ice he could out of the small fridge and packed it into a small cooler with the remainder of Alex’s medicine, then wrapped the cooler up in a couple of wool blankets and set it under a Mylar survival blanket.
Everything he couldn’t load into the Land Rover got piled into the garage. Knowing those feral beasts – escaped prisoners it sounded like – were out there looting, he couldn’t bear to leave them anything useful to let them terrorize anybody else. So he doused the whole pile of food, medicine, tools, books, blankets, clothes, and everything else with gasoline, and dropped a match on it to engulf it all in flames.
With Alex riding shotgun, Roy then drove the Land Rover through the gate to his property and looked into his mirror to see the still smoking remains of his home next to the brightly burning garage, when suddenly, he heard the loud report of a gunshot and a bullet shattered the rear window!
Chapter 3
It wasn’t until he was on the helicopter that Ben started to suspect how much blood he’d lost from the wound on his leg.
Once he was no longer in terror of being shot, by the woman in the bunker, by any of the other prisoners outside the house, by the gunners in the helicopter, by the ones frisking him, the pain in his leg hit him like a wrecking ball and left him nauseous and dizzy.
Having it tightly bound up once they were airborne lessened the pain a little bit, to a steady throb, but he still wavered between wanting to pass out and throw up.
To keep either from happening, he focused on the woman from the bunker. She was terrified of something, trying desperately to communicate with one of the soldiers on board.
Ben remembered seeing a man and a little girl in the bunker with her. He looked around and saw neither of them on board.
He didn’t remember seeing them come out of the basement to get onto the other helicopter, but he could have missed half of a parade going past while he was face down on the ground with a rifle pointed at his head.
When the helicopter finally hit the ground, the soldiers dismounted. He heard somebody shout for a stretcher. As the aircraft’s engine wound down, it became quieter inside.
“What’s your name, kid?” Josie asked, awkwardly wiggling to him.
“Ben. Ben Cooper.”
“My name’s Josie Foster,” said Josie. “You’re my brother-in-law, Steve Foster for now. Son of Mike and Betty, from Boulder, Colorado, Roy’s your brother, and Alex is your niece.”
Ben remembered seeing the little girl in the bunker. He was glad to have a name to go with her face, and wondered how she was doing. “Your birthday is Three, Fourteen, Ninety-Two,�
�� she said. “St Patty’s Day.”
“Huh?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“You’re Steve Foster. I’m married to my husband Roy, and Alexandria is your niece. You are the son of Mike and Betty from Boulder, Colorado. Don’t respond to Ben or Benjamin at all.”
That was all she was able to tell him, before a folding stretcher was pushed onto the deck next to him. A couple of soldiers carefully set him onto the stretcher.
“Steve!” Josie said. “Where are you taking him?”
“Infirmary, ma’am,” one of the soldiers said, as they slid the stretcher off the deck.
Ben started reciting, “Steve Foster, Boulder, Mike and Betty, Roy, Josie, Alex” to himself as they carried him away. He let his head roll to the right.
He continued to recite the litany of his new identity silently to himself. He wasn’t sure why Josie had given him that information, but he was pretty sure it just might save his life.
From what he could see, while studiously looking only to one side, the helicopter had landed near a large school, maybe a high school or a community college.
Rows of tents filled the athletic fields, and banks of military vehicles were lined up in the parking lot. The whole place was noisy – the humming of generators seemed almost as loud as the helicopters.
He was carried inside the building – obviously a high school he realized once inside, down a hallway, and into a classroom that had been converted, with bright overhead lights, three exam tables, and stainless steel cabinet full of supplies, into a medical room.
At this early hour of the morning, the building was almost deserted, and there was nobody else in the exam room except for a man in pale green scrubs with a name tag that said, “Blackwell, Thomas D, LPN”, and a young soldier.
The nurse started to remove the bloodied bandage from his leg wound while the soldier produced a clipboard from somewhere and started asking questions. Name, date of birth, hometown, was he with anybody else…
Ben had gotten to that last question when he noticed something. One of the cabinets had several boxes with blue circles on them. He suddenly remembered where he’d seen that symbol before – in the prison infirmary.
The blue circle was a universal sign, and indicated drugs or food for diabetics. He also saw that blue circle on some of the boxes inside the bunker.
That must explain why the little girl looked so sick. Ben couldn’t imagine what it must be like, trying to manage a diabetic child in these conditions.
“My niece, Alexandria,” Ben said to the soldier taking his information, and loud enough to catch the nurse’s attention. “She’s diabetic, and I think you guys left her out at the farm. You’ve got to send somebody back for her.”
That definitely caught the nurse’s attention. “Type one or two?” he asked.
Ben couldn’t remember the difference, just that there were a couple of guys in his cell block that went to the infirmary twice a day for a dose of insulin.
“Whichever one requires the daily shots,” he said. “I always thought my brother and his wife were crazy for trying to raise her out there like that, but there they are. You’ve got to make sure somebody gets out there to help them.”
The nurse took a break from working on Ben’s leg to confer with the soldier. A terse, quiet conversation ensued, with the nurse writing a quick note.
“I’m sorry,” he said, going back to looking at Ben’s leg. “They have been very careless on some of their patrols about being sure they evacuate everybody from a building. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of them going out to tag, bag, and run, and leave kids or old folks behind.”
“There was actually a lot of shooting going on when the Army got there,” Ben said.
“I know,” the nurse said, pointedly looking at the wound on Ben’s leg. “The good news is that the bullet went in and out of you, so I don’t have to send you over to an OR. You had a minor cut to an artery though, and that needs to be stitched up. I’m going to numb the area for you.”
The little sting of the local anesthetic was worth it, for the relief it finally brought from the pain.
While the nurse sutured the wound, Ben took his time, reading every box, vial, and label he could see.
He tried not to become a crook in prison, but survival in that environment required a certain moral flexibility and a lot of attention to detail and willingness to take advantage of situations.
The nurse finished working on Ben’s leg and leaned into the hallway to call for somebody. A different soldier came in and escorted Ben out of the building and into one of the blocks of tents.
Like the other blocks he could see, this one was surrounded by a razor-wire topped, chain link fence. There was a placard beside the gate into it that read Single Male Housing.
Ben was handed off from one soldier to another, who led him to a larger tent than the others, green canvas as opposed to a desert-colored lighter material of the rest of the tents.
Somehow the clipboard with his information, that he hadn’t seen since the nurse sent the first soldier away, materialized.
Ben was handed a plastic bag that looked like it contained a blanket, sheets, a pillow, a towel and washcloth, a change of clothing, and a pouch of personal hygiene items. From there, he was escorted deeper into the tent block.
The soldier indifferently recited a set of rules to him, told him when meal times were, and bid him a good night at Tent 22, telling him to take Cot G inside.
Ben found Cot G, made up the bed quickly, and despite a fresh resurgence of pain in his leg, he was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.
It wasn’t until lunchtime that Ben finally woke up. The first thing he noticed was the stink of too many unwashed men who just didn’t care about their conditions.
His first few days in the system, when he was in the county jail after first being arrested and held until he was charged, he was in a holding block that had the same stench. It was the same after his trial, when he was shipped out to the prison and held in a temporary housing block overnight.
The conditions were definitely much better in his assigned, permanent block. There were twice-daily cleaning details that went through the common areas, and each pair of prisoners was expected to sweep and mop their cell every day. Bedding was exchanged and laundry done weekly. But mostly, once people settled into the routine of prison and realized their little cells were their home, they tended to start to care.
There were still the ones that ended up in psych, isolation, or who decided to devolve into filth in some sort of protest of something or another that stank the place up, but they were the exceptions and not the rule.
This tent, filled with single men whose entire world had tumbled into chaos around them, had simply run out of a very important vitamin.
It was clear to Ben in the miasma around him, the haphazard piles of clothing, they way they shuffled around aimlessly. These men had no purpose, no drive.
It would have been a mistake to assume they were passive, though. Ben had been living inside of a cage with animals for the past few years. Even stronger than the smell in the air was the tension.
Every man inside the tent, every one he passed once he left the tent to go eat, every single face in the chow hall had a tightness to it. These men had been cooped up with nothing to do for too long, and they all had no idea how long they were all going to be cooped up together.
Part of the reason people in prison ganged up was to give them communities. The fights between the gangs gave them things to think about and to plan for. Every man knew how long he had until he was released or got his parole hearing.
Life in prison had ways of bleeding that tension off a little bit. As Ben shoveled food into his mouth as fast as he could, to get out of the big mess tent as soon as possible, he knew that there were no built in safety valves in this camp. At least not in the warehouse full of single men.
A couple of mindless hours later, a soldier came to Tent 22.
“Steve Foster!” he called out.
It took Ben a second to remember who he was supposed to be. He hadn’t yet introduced himself to any of the other men in the tent, so hadn’t spoken that name out loud since his intake.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Sixteen hundred hours. Four o’clock for you, come up to the front gate. Your sister in law will be in the east common area.”
“Thanks,” Ben said.
He didn’t have a watch to check. There was no clock in the tent. He looked around him, didn’t see anybody else wearing a timepiece. Finally, he gave up and walked to the front gate. The soldiers there told him it was 15:30, or 3:30 to Ben.
A half hour later, he and a handful of other men were escorted over to a spot of empty field between two of the tent blocks. “Well bring you back in an hour to head to chow,” one of the soldiers said, as he opened the gate.
Ben found Josie pretty quickly.
“Hi,” he said.
“You managed to avoid the bad boy block, it looks like.”
“Yes,” Ben decided to keep his observations on how it compared to prison to himself. “Thank you for that.”
“You seem like a good kid that just made some real bad choices at some point,” Josie said, tentatively. “Plus, I’m afraid to be out here alone. I mean, we’re in different blocks entirely, but I didn’t want to be stuck here not knowing anybody at all. And I’m going to be alone here for even longer.”
“How so?”
“A little after noon, I got a message. They sent another couple of helicopters out to the homestead. Said everything had been burnt down. They got shot at again by some people. Described them as a bunch of guys in prison guard gear with tattoos. Said they checked the bunker in the basement, but didn’t see Alex. Just a bunch of numbers written on the bunker door and the wall inside.”
Josie took out a paper that had several rows of two-digit numbers written in one hand, letters beneath each pair of numbers in a different one. The decoded text said, JON J 153 ROCK CANYON DR CARLETON IDAHO.
