The Devil's Road: Devil Dog Book 2 (Out Of The Dark)

by Boyd Craven III

  “There were elements in several cities, Dearborn and Ann Arbor, Michigan for example, where there were radical religious factions that acted with the knowledge of the coming attack and destabilized the region. Those citizens and immigrants are being dealt with by a large force that has come down from Camp Grayling, and from all over the Midwest. Acts of violence, terrorism, and hate crimes are running rampant throughout the country. The racial violence in the states is staggering, and if there was ever a time for America to pull together, now is the time. Remember, neither race nor religion is a good enough reason to take up arms against your fellow humans.

  “There are, of course, more militant factions within the country, those who are born with radical conservative views who have openly refused orders and even attacked government agents and their leadership.

  “These factions will be stamped out, and their leadership brought to justice. We will not tolerate former members of our armed services to openly mock and attack the government in their own homes and cities.” He paused for a moment before going on.

  “As some of you may have already realized or heard, each governor of the state has had the National Guard activated. All current and former service members are required to report for duty or evaluation, if you are between the ages of eighteen through sixty-five, at the nearest National Guard outpost. Now, I have heard about units going rogue and how things were settled, as the intelligence comes in to me slowly… but it will not be tolerated. Military members will report for duty, or be prosecuted per executive order. Those men and women who betrayed their oaths… you will be dealt with as well.

  “Law enforcement - I know many of you, like so many of the National Guard units, have had to go home now to protect your families. It was your duty as a husband, wife, parent, or guardian. Now it is time to guard our country, our cities, and our way of life. You are to report back to your stations and precincts, where you will be resupplied by the FEMA emergency managers, who report to the governors and myself. Martial law is in effect until lifted by executive order, and all elections have been suspended.

  “I…” the president paused again. “I really hope to suspend martial law as quickly as I can, because my advisors now tell me over eighty percent of the country has died off in four separate waves. The very sick or on life support, the ones taking lifesaving medications, from disease and starvation, and lastly from human predation. I am asking everyone to assist with the rebuilding efforts and for your cooperation with the governors of the state.

  “For those of you still in FEMA camps, I urge you to stay and continue the work. Some have told me that it’s been called the equivalent of labor camps or even concentration camps. From what I’ve been briefed on, I do not agree with that assessment. The horrors of a few minor instances does not paint the picture of the entire effort of FEMA and NATO to help our nation getting kick-started again. Without the labor to build critical components, we cannot pull ourselves out of the ashes. Instead of going to work, we’re asking the people we’re taking care of in the camps to do their part in contributing to rebuild our country.

  “Again, attacks against those camps will not be tolerated, and those who instigate or support them will be brought to justice.” The words chilled each one of us. “I want to stress to you; those in the camps are not prisoners, they are there where we can aid with key infrastructure designed to help the population out.

  “…That is why with great regret, I have one last sad piece of news. The southwest area of the country is being invaded, for lack of a better term, by a private army whose members are from all over the world, seemingly financed by agents of ISIS and North Korea, being guided into the country by the cartels. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of California are now open battle fields. There is very little information to go on now, and even if I had it I could not share it openly before verifying its sources. We believe it to be the start…” The president made another long pause. “We believe it’s the start of a land campaign, the like of which Americans haven’t seen in many lifetimes. As soon as our Navy and Air Force bring personnel and equipment back, they will be pressed into service, defending our borders and key infrastructure.

  “My fellow Americans, it is now time to take back our country and pull ourselves out of the ashes of a charred existence. I will be in touch. God Bless.”

  I felt the blood draining from my face. I hadn’t been on the horn as much as others, so a lot of this was brand new information. Confirmation that we’d been hit with an EMP was a little eye-opening, but I had already figured as much. Rogue elements? Persecution? Then it hit me. I was being recalled.

  “Damn,” Mel said, and she didn’t get the scolding I thought was coming.

  “It’s real, isn’t it?” Jamie asked me.

  “It’s… It sounded like him. The President,” I said, startled as the announcement started playing again.

  I turned it down and then changed the preset frequencies, and the same announcement was being played. I tuned into another frequency, and again, the same. So much for Mel talking to her dad. The signal was strong, which gave me pause. The broadcast was being made on what appeared to be all ham frequencies and some of the others the radio was programmed in. That was interesting…

  “Looks pretty real to me,” Mel said quietly. “Does that mean you’re heading off?”

  “No,” I told them. “I won’t leave you guys here. Hell, I’m going to go home to see Mary and Maggie before I even consider something like that. I don’t really think I’m fit for duty, so I’m not going to stress on it,” I said, making a twirling motion next to my temple.

  “Don’t do that,” Jamie said, pulling my hand down, without letting it go. “If what they said was true, there’s probably no way to enforce it anyways. They said eighty percent of the country has already died off.”

  I knew it should have been worse, much worse. According to the EMP commission’s report, ninety percent plus would die off right away. Maybe as a country, we’d fared better?

  “Go ahead and use the radio,” I told them. “I’ve gotta think for a minute.” I pulled my hand from Jamie’s and went to my pile of stuff.

  I put on my vest and slung the KSG and started walking.

  “Are you ok?” Mel asked.

  “Let him be,” Jamie told her.

  I looked east and squinted. The sun was almost overhead, but as I walked towards the asphalt of 34, I had a hard time believing that, with eighty percent of the country dead, a ragtag army was invading us. Where was the Navy? Where was the Coast Guard? Had things really collapsed so completely that even law enforcement was not showing up anymore?

  I stopped just short of the pavement and looked in both directions. Grunting, I knelt down and looked at the veritable sea of green in front of me. Nobody was coming, nobody was going. Both in real time and metaphorically speaking. My head hurt, and bits of the dream came to me as I sat down and thought. Gas, water, drop off the girls, go see Mary and Maggie—

  “Really Dick, you ok?” Mel asked as she plopped down next to me after putting on her own miniaturized version of battle rattle.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s one thing to suspect something, it’s another to know it as a fact. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. I mean, I’ve seen some terrible shit in this world, been in the middle of it… but I’ve never seen eighty percent mortality anywhere.”

  The kiddo leaned over and put her head on my shoulder before speaking. “Are you worried about Mary and Maggie being so close to Texas?”

  A shiver ran through me, and she sat back, looking at me. I nodded.

  “It doesn’t make sense to me though. Why invade us? I would get it if it was a foreign nation, but it sounds like an alphabet soup of evil villains is coming after us.”

  “Doesn’t sound plausible, does it?” Mel asked me.

  “You sure talk like an adult, Mel. I hope me talking out loud isn’t going to scare you.”

  “As opposed to talking in your head, to your
self?” she asked, and I had to look to see she was grinning. I smiled back.

  “Well, yeah, there’s that. But you asked.”

  “I know. You know, when my dad would talk about this stuff, I used to think he was a little kooky. Not too bad, but when you grow up with your dad’s old Y2K stash of freeze dried foods and the old farm becomes a bugout with a bunker… it kind of gets cool. I mean, shooting guns, packing food, learning about sociology.”

  “What’s your dad like?” I asked her, curious about a man who was a prepper.

  “He’s almost as big as you. He likes to play cards and play with his radios…” Her words trailed off as she looked up at the sky, lost in memory for a moment. “One time, in eighth grade, some boy stopped over to talk to me. He’d seen me with some of my older friends who were in high school and thought I was too. He was kind of cute.” She stopped talking as her mom walked up, giving her the stink eye.

  “And what did your father do?” Jamie asked her rhetorically.

  “He loaded a shotgun on the porch while I talked to the guy. He left pretty quickly,” Mel told me, grinning.

  “You’re too young to date anyway.”

  “That’s what I said,” Jamie added, grinning as Mel made a face.

  The past month, I’d seen a lot of personal growth in a lot of the people around me. Hell, in the last month and a half. None was more surprising than the already mature girl I’d mistaken for my daughter. With that memory in mind, I opened the pouch where I kept the picture and looked at it. I held it out so I could see better, my up-close sight getting a little rusty. It was their smiles that won me over, and their memory that kept me going. Now that I’d stepped outside my addictions and planned a course of action, life seemed clear.

  “So your dad was a bit protective and likes guns. What’d he do for a living… before?” I asked.

  “County sheriff,” Jamie said, grinning as my jaw dropped.

  “Dang, now I know what song to never play around him,” I told Mel seriously.

  “Oh, he hates that song,” she told me, grinning. “Not unless you want to see him load his…” her words trailed off as she looked at my KSG, and her composure cracked.

  I knew she must have been thinking of her dad. Probably missing him. I’d do what I could to get her home, but I couldn’t take away the pain of being separated from him.

  “We’re so close. If she could have talked to Steve for a moment,” Jamie said, walking up to me and giving me a one-armed hug.

  I surprised myself and hugged her back, and we stood like that as Mel sat down on her sleeping pad and curled up on her side.

  “She didn’t get much sleep,” Jamie told me, breaking the hug and stepping back.

  “I’ll get you two home, I promise.”

  The radio quit broadcasting the president’s message, and for a moment, the silence was attention-getting. Jamie walked over to the radio and punched in the frequency.

  “Black Heart, this is Momma Bear, do you copy?” Jamie asked into the head piece.

  “You’re saying it wrong, Mom,” Mel said without looking up.

  “I know, now shush,” Jamie said.

  The radio crackled, and her husband’s voice came out of the handset. “… you baby… Mel… I’m going to… … Something is… … Lincoln is where… … Copy?”

  “No Black Heart, I did not copy. Go to channel two?”

  “Copy two,” his voice came back distorted.

  She switched over and waited.

  “Lincoln… Survivors… in the… FEMA … doing its… I’m working … red … Nato—”

  The feed was cut off abruptly somehow, and a voice came over the frequency. “This is a restricted frequency. If you are survivors in need of assistance, give us your location.”

  “Uhhh… what do I do?” Jamie asked me.

  The voice was not American. Granted, he was speaking English, but he had an almost Eastern European accent or even Russian. My mind started spinning with possibilities. I grabbed the handset.

  “We are not in need of assistance. Sorry for broadcasting,” I said quickly into it.

  I was met with silence and the frequency went dead. Nothing was on it, not even static. I quickly turned it off and pulled the antenna cord out of the jack and started winding it up. I knew that military agencies had the ability to DF (direction find) people by radio transmissions, but as long as we weren’t hooked up and transmitting actively, he couldn’t find us. The real question was, would they be looking for us, and why was I worried about it?

  “Who was that?” Jamie asked.

  “How should I know?” I asked, a little bit annoyed.

  “I mean, who do you think he’s with? The government, FEMA? Steve said something about Nato and FEMA, but the transmission was garbled.”

  “They were probably jamming it,” Mel said.

  The kid startled me because she must have somehow gotten up while I was rolling the antenna wire and popped out at me like a demented jack in the box. Still, I didn’t drop the radio equipment as I packed it up in my bag for a quick escape. For the time being, I’d leave the battery out. We’d barely used it.

  “I couldn’t make out what Dad said,” Mel said, more of a statement than a question or request for information.

  “I couldn’t make out much either. It almost sounded like he’s working with someone. He mentioned Lincoln a couple of times.”

  “What’s in Lincoln?” I asked her.

  “Not much. He goes in there for work sometimes. He said something about survivors. I wonder…”

  “He wouldn’t have moved to a city, would he?” I asked both Mel and Jamie.

  “No. But it’s kind of creepy that all of a sudden somebody breaks into our transmission and tells us it’s restricted now. It never used to be.”

  “Martial law,” Mel said. “Remember Dad talking about that? With martial law, they can do anything.”

  “Who can, sweetie?” Jamie asked.

  “The government.”

  I looked at her and remembered the voice’s slight accent. “I don’t think that was from the government.”

  “Then who was it?” Mel said.

  “I don’t know,” I told them. “Listen, we still have a few hours of daylight left. Let's rest up as much as we can. If we’re lucky, we’ll find that spring to fill our water bottles. I’m going to go get some gas.”

  “I’ll keep the home fires burning,” Mel said with a smirk.

  “You feeling better now that you got to talk to your dad?” I asked her, happy that she had snapped out of her funk.

  “Yeah. Just… it’s just that… we’re so close.”

  “We are, and it won’t be long now.”

  I dug around in the truck and found the only gas can we had. It’d been shoved into the passenger side corner by the tailgate and was buried under Courtney’s pack. I’d rather have a large five-gallon can, but I had to make do with a small two-gallon one.

  “Need a hand?” Mel asked me, coming over.

  “Naw, you stay here,” I said, pulling off my KSG and handing it to her. “There're half a dozen cars close by. I’m going to go spike the tanks and get some gas. Hold on to that for me,” I told her.

  She took it, and her face broke into a confused look. “I thought it’d be heavier.”

  “It gets plenty heavy, the longer you wear that strap or hold the gun up, kiddo.”

  “Hut two three four,” she said with a mock about-face. She started pacing a small four-step march before turning and starting over again.

  “Still a kid,” I mumbled.

  “Thank God,” Jamie agreed.

  14

  Siphoning fuel wasn’t as difficult as people thought. There were all sorts of methods to get around the anti-siphoning devices on modern cars, and my favorite one was to cut the rubber hose from the fill tube next to the gas tank and drop a hose in from there. Luckily, in the middle of nowhere Nebraska, there were several cars close by that had been killed by the EMP and left
where they were. Part of me wondered where the owners were, where they may have gone… but it’d been months since the balloon had gone up. From what I’d seen early on in Chicago, the cars’ gas tanks had been left alone while their interiors had been looted.

  That’s what it looked like here. I was moving between the rows of cornstalks, straight west about two hundred yards past our camp, when I found our first prospect. It was a black Tahoe. Even though the paint was covered in dust and pollen, it was a beast of an SUV. Still, I didn’t have anything to siphon with. Yet. I checked the driver’s door, and it was unlocked. I opened it and almost staggered back from the explosive heat that had built up. I didn’t need to climb in, but I fumbled with the dash till I found the hood release.

  I popped it and walked to the front. It took me a minute to figure out how the hood stayed open, and I checked in there. The heater hoses were too large, except for the smaller-diameter ones that went to the heater core in the dash. Instead, I was looking for something similar but with more length. I found it and prayed that nobody from the EPA was going to see what I was about to do. I got my sheath knife out and sawed through the rubber hose that connected the air conditioning system together. It took quite a bit to saw through the hose, and when I got an end free, I wasn’t surprised to see the rubber hose reinforced with mesh. I was surprised by the rush of coolant vapor though.

  Finding the other end after I discharged the system, I cut that free as well. It gave me almost four feet of rubber hose about three quarters of an inch in diameter. That should do it. I went back to the driver’s side rear wheel and dropped down.

  “Fuck,” I said to myself.

  I had to take my vest off. I was too bulky with it on to get my upper body underneath the SUV. Still, when I lay back down and started scooting, the asphalt went from scorching hot to somewhat warm as I got underneath the Tahoe. I was taking a risk here because the vehicle had a digital gas gauge, so I didn’t know if this was on fumes or a full tank when the electronics died. I found the fill hose and made sure I still had the AC hose close at hand. I did, and I pulled my knife and cut the fill hose as close to the tank as I could.