by Nick Randall
“Some of those guys must have come back, so Roy and Alex fled,” Josie said.
“You know who this Jon J guy is and where he lives?”
“Roy knew him in the Army. Another prepper. They used to share information back and forth a lot. I can only assume Roy took Alex to his place, but there’s no way out of here.”
Ben looked around. The field they were in, like every other part of the tent city, was surrounded by a fence and razor wire. Armed soldiers patrolled the perimeter. He noticed that the ones around the single males’ block were getting antsy. Something wasn’t right.
“Supposedly, this isn’t a prison,” Josie said. “Oh, sorry…”
Ben just shook his head at her, to let her know no offense was taken.
Josie continued: “They tell us they’re not holding us here, but there seems to be no process for actually getting out. I don’t know what to do. How to get to Roy and Alex. If they have any way of even knowing where I am.”
She ran her hands through her hair and sighed loudly. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your problem,” she said.
“Look, you saved my life,” Ben told her. “I owe you. And thinking about how to get you out of here will give me something to do. This place is already getting to me. It’s worse than prison was in some ways.”
He could hear a ruckus starting from near his part of the tent block.
“You think you can do it?” Josie asked.
Ben looked back at Josie. “I don’t know, but I’ll try. I swear.”
Josie looked down at her watch. “Probably time for us to head out for dinner.”
Ben shook his head. “We’re not going anywhere fast.”
He pointed towards his part of camp. A column of smoke was just breaking over the nearest tents, followed by a handful of gunshots. Soldiers rushed into the common yard, ordering Ben over to one side and Josie to another, splitting up the men and women.
Chapter 4
The gunshots and smoke had come from a riot breaking out in the men’s camp. The soldiers were afraid of the riot spreading, so they locked everybody down.
It took more than an hour for them to let anybody out of the common yard, starting with the unattended females, like Josie.
She was marched through through the family block and into the single females’ camp to get to her mess tent, finished dinner, and got passage back into the family block to look in on the common yard, and saw that Ben and a couple dozen other men were still left in a clump in the corner of the yard, waiting for their block to settle.
She really wished she could have brought him a little something to eat, but at the same time, he looked the least troubled of the men around him.
She wondered if this wasn’t his first riot. Or maybe prison had just taught him to take certain things in stride. Josie felt really foolish for trusting him as much as she did, but she’d always had a good gut feel for strangers.
It was that gut feel that got her to notice Roy when most others never gave him a second glance. He had just gotten home from his first deployment out to Afghanistan and had that look about him of somebody that had lost too much and didn’t know how to get any of it back.
Most of her friends thought he looked like he was constantly ready to pop off, but she felt safe around him. In all the time she’d known him, the only time she’d ever really felt frightened in his presence was the other day when he completely went off on Alex for not locking the door.
But that mistake had actually let somebody with really bad intent into their home, and she and her family could have been easily killed in their sleep.
That one mistake probably led to the raid on their home that destroyed everything she and Roy had built up together, almost gotten him killed, and had in fact separated her from her husband and daughter.
If the only time Roy really lost his temper in their ten years together was over something that deadly serious, for all that he’d been through in his life, they were doing really well.
Looking back over at Ben, she realized that it wasn’t just his quiet innocence, or his calmness that got her to trust him. She remembered how he’d looked at Alex in the bunker, a look of legitimate concern on his face.
And she realized that every time he looked at her, he kept eye contact. Josie didn’t know how long he’d been in prison, but the fact he wasn’t salivating over possibly the first woman he’d seen in months or years told her he really must be a good kid at heart.
Of course, what she was really needing now was for him to be not so good for a bit, to help her get out of the camp and back to her husband and daughter.
“Good luck, kid,” she said, as she turned away from the fence.
From what Josie had been able to pick up since she’d arrived in the camp that morning, they were in a suburb of Boise, Idaho.
Depending on which side they were on, that meant Carleton was anywhere from thirty to fifty miles away. It would probably take a few days for Ben and her to figure out how they were going to get out, and who knows how many days to make the walk. They’d need supplies.
Laying in her cot, in her tent – because there was really nothing else for her to do – she really had to wonder if heading out to look for Roy and Alex was a wise choice or not.
She and Roy thought they were prepared for something going wrong in the outside world and were shown in no uncertain terms that they hadn’t prepared anywhere near enough.
A full year of intensive building and canning, preserving food, and gathering supplies, and all of it had gone up in smoke the first time somebody came by wanting what they had.
So Josie couldn’t help but wonder if maybe she would be safer in the camp than outside of it. At least there was a ring of soldiers around her, and the riot in the men’s area excepted, it seemed like things were reasonably orderly.
She’d gotten three meals that day, had a place to sleep, and was given a change of clothes. But not much else. The women she was tented with were similarly bored and turning on each other. There was just a bitter resentment hanging in the air, coloring every interaction.
Maybe it was better in the family block, where people had people they knew, but it wasn’t all that great where she was. The one woman in her tent that was pretty decent was Laura. She had that same stillness in the face of adversity that Ben showed, but it was somehow different. They’d talked some, and Josie found out she was a former Marine.
Josie would have liked to have become friends, but she and aura were just too far apart in personality to really have anything to talk about.
Josie did notice that Laura kept a protective eye on her, though. Nobody seemed willing to mess with Laura, or by extension, Josie.
Josie fell asleep still pondering where to go and what to do, if sending Ben off to find some way to escape would just result in disappointing him when she lost her nerve.
At least she was giving him something to do. And maybe, he’d choose to just go off by himself if she didn’t go with him, to get himself out of the camp and make his own clean start somewhere else.
She was waken up deep in the night by somebody shaking her shoulder.
“What?” Josie turned to see it was one of the other women in the tent.
“Got some boys over, want one?” the woman asked.
Josie looked around. Four men were in the tent. Two had already paired up with some of her tent mates. The other two were clearly assessing the merchandise. One of them definitely had an eye on Josie.
“Hell no!” Josie said.
The other woman immediately covered her mouth and snapped, “You don’t have to join us, but you don’t have to give us away, either! Don’t want to play, take yourself a real long walk to the shitters, OK?”
As she got out of her tent, Josie was immensely relieved that she had fallen asleep while still dressed. She looked at her watch, and saw that it was three in the morning.
She started walking towards the guard post near the gate when she heard Laura say, “Don’t.”
<
br /> Josie turned to see her sitting a little to the left of the entrance.
“Didn’t think you’d want any part of that, so let’s go for a walk,” Laura gestured for Josie to join her.
Josie was about to say something about reporting what was going on, but Laura cut her off. “Don’t, I said. Just don’t. Things won’t go well for you if you take this away from them. It kind of rotates, seems our tent gets a visit once a week or so. Believe me, the men’s side would have gone up long ago if this didn’t go on.”
“I just can’t believe they let these guys just walk into our tent like that!”
“Just keep sleeping in your clothes,” Laura said. “Look, I help keep things calm, and there’s always more of us than there are of them in any tent. You’re just going to have to learn to deal with some things.”
When morning arrived Josie had decided she wasn’t going to just deal with things. Barely a full day in the camp and she’d seen a riot break out and a sex party happen in her tent, heard about kids in the family block getting felt up and worse and women in her own block getting raped, and witnessed what few possessions people managed to sneak in being confiscated by the soldiers.
It was just like in Roy’s book. Camps like this seemed to lower people of all personality types down to the lowest common denominators of humanity.
It was at then that Josie decided she need to get out and give it another go out there rather than slowly find herself chipped away in a tented city. Maybe Jon had a better setup than she’d been able to build with Roy. Maybe having two old soldiers together would make for a naturally better defense.
Maybe, Josie figured, maybe she and Roy had simply gotten unlucky, having randomly fallen on the path the prisoners had been taking to somewhere else. Besides, Roy had left that message for her specifically. He wanted her to join him.
Josie had vowed at their wedding to always stand by Roy, be it for better or worse. She went to the guard hut to request a bit more time with Ben in the common yard later.
Chapter 5
It took Roy a half-second to process the fact that a bullet had just shattered the rear window of the Land Rover.
But the moment he did, he immediately gunned the engine and the vehicle took off down the road in a thick cloud of dust.
“HEAD DOWN, ALEX!” he screamed. “HEAD DOWN!”
More bullets whizzed overhead or struck the vehicle as Roy forcefully pushed Alex’s head down in the passenger seat and kept his own head as low as he possibly could.
Struggling to keep the rapidly accelerating vehicle on the road, Roy tried to glance in the rearview mirror to see who was shooting but the dust cloud permitted him to see nothing.
Roy focused his attention instead on the road to stay on course, pressing harder and harder on the gas pedal and not slowing down even when the shooting stopped.
Back at the homestead, Ojo watched the Land Rover disappear down the road and cursed in anger. Ben’s smoking Glock 17 was in his hand, the slide locked to the rear indicating it was empty.
Behind him stood the only two other members of the gang who had not been captured or killed: Spider and Jonah.
“That was him, that was him!” Ojo exclaimed, pointing past the dust cloud that was clearing away. “That was the worthless bastard who killed Dominic!”
“How do you know for sure?” Jonah asked.
“Because this was his house, you mindless idiot!” Ojo gritted his teeth. “That was him! That was the man who killed my little brother!”
After the helicopter attack on the homestead, Ojo, Jonah, and Spider had all managed to flee into the woods undetected. Jonah and Spider ran ahead and it wasn’t until they stopped from exhaustion to take a break that Ojo had caught up with them. He immediately wanted to go back to the homestead once the helicopters had left, but Jonah and Spider strongly objected.
Finally, after a few hours of resting against cedar trees and eating some food that Spider and Jonah had taken from the house, Ojo announced that he would head back to the homestead alone, even without his ‘brothers.’ He just promptly turned and began stomping back through the woods, and Spider didn’t wait long before he got up to follow, more out of curiosity than anything. Scared at the prospect of being left alone in the forest, Jonah waited a few minutes before eventually pulling himself up off the ground to go follow them as well.
Now, Jonah and Spider watched as Ojo just stood there staring down the road as if he were staring down eternity.
Finally, Ojo looked down at the empty Glock in his hand and tossed it away carelessly.
Then, he slowly turned around to face Jonah and Spider. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a switchblade. He flicked the sharp silver blade open and held out his left hand.
“On Dominic’s grave, I swear that that man will pay for what he has taken from me with his life,” Ojo’s voice was strong, unwavering, and sincere, entirely different from what Jonah and Spider were used to.
In a quick blur, he slashed across the palm of his left hand with the knife. Jonah winced in a painful expression as if Ojo had done it to him instead.
Ojo clenched his hand into a tight fist and the blood seeped out through the cracks between his fingers.
“I swear that I will not leave this world to join my brother until that man is dead on the ground before me.”
* * *
The drive to Carleton was rough for Roy and Alex. He had to exercise those old tactical driving skills he’d picked up in combat, keeping his eyes open for potential ambush spots and finding the best ways to not be slowed down in them.
It had taken in a long time after every deployment to unclench and stop driving around home like he was still over there, to be able to just relax and enjoy the trip somewhere instead of feeling vulnerable every moment, waiting for bullets to start flying through the vehicle, or for something on the side of the road or underneath him to explode.
The fact that the drive started out with live rounds shattering his back window didn’t help any. There were two bullet holes in the windshield that literally kept a reminder of both the current danger, and those hours and miles of past danger, literally at eye level.
As much as it worried him how Alex had slumped into the passenger seat, barely moving, he was kind of glad she had spent most of the trip asleep.
He felt guilty for that, because he knew he shouldn’t think of her failing health as good fortune, but he was also so on edge that he was sure he’d snap at her real hard if she’d been as chattery and inquisitive as she normally was.
The way he’d blown up at her just a couple of days before was starting to eat at him a little, and he wanted more than anything to take it back.
As the miles went on, Roy wasn’t sure if the fact that Idaho couldn’t have looked any less like either Iraq or Afghanistan made things better or worse.
The change of scenery meant the worst of his memories didn’t spring to mind, at least. But the different scenery added variables that he wasn’t used to, the tree-lined, curvy roads provided so many more hiding places, and caused him to slow down frequently.
When he was about a half mile out from Jon’s place, he found somewhere to pull the Land Rover up an old driveway that looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
He drove up far enough that the vehicle couldn’t be seen from the road, getting it up close to some thick bushes. After a couple hours of tense, white-knuckle driving, Roy felt like he needed to pry his fingers off of the steering wheel.
He stepped out and took a bow saw out of the back, quickly cutting some of the bushes, as well as some low-hanging limbs from nearby trees to camouflage the Land Rover.
He didn’t want to leave the car and the valuable supplies it held, but he wanted to get out and have a subtle look around before driving up in something that would attract a lot of attention.
Once he was reasonably happy with his concealment job, he took his little wind-up alarm clock, and set if for four hours. He didn’t want to risk i
t, but the tiny amount of sleep he’d had since the flash-bang was wearing pretty thin.
The tension on the drive down had kept him awake for that, but now that he felt like he was free of immediate danger for a while, the lack of sleep was catching up with him fast. He knew he was at the point where he would start making really stupid mistakes if he didn’t pay up fast.
When his alarm went off, he reached down into the passenger footwell and opened the cooler as quick as he could to get another dose of insulin for Alex.
He woke her up to give it to her and waited about fifteen minutes for her to start perking up.
He opened an MRE, pouring the packet of instant coffee straight into his mouth and washing it down with half a bottle of water. Then he made Alex a lunch with her food while he ate the rest of his meal.
Once they had some honest calories inside them, Roy told Alex, “Alright, little soldier. Time for us to do some recon.”
“Like pulling watch at the house?” she asked.
“No. Instead of standing guard against bad guys coming to get us, we’re going to walk somewhere to check something out, and then come back here.”
“What are we checking out?”
“One of my old Army buddies has a really nice house. Remember the three little pigs?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we didn’t build a straw house, but we had a house made of sticks. So the big bad wolves were able to burn it own. My friend has a house built out of bricks. We’re going to see if he has been able to keep the wolves away, and if we can stay with him to figure out how to get Mom.”
“I miss mom.”
“We both do. That’s why I left her a message to come here if she can, so we can all be together again. So, let’s get moving so we can start making that happen, OK?”
Roy took his AR-15 out of the truck. He still had his tactical vest on from the previous day’s firefight with a few spare magazines, and his trusty Beretta was holstered on his hip.
He debated giving Alex the Beretta, but he knew that the worst thing in a firefight was an untrained gun on any side. She’d be safer if she just made herself small under some cover if anything happened. While they walked, Roy kept reinforcing what she should do at the first sign of gunfire.
