Get Out of Denver (Denver Burning Book 1)

by Algor X. Dennison

  When the rest of the group approached, McLean had dismounted and was in conversation with a sturdy woman with long salt-and-pepper hair and an older man standing next to her on the porch. McLean introduced them. “This is Mrs. Mary Hendrickson, everybody, and her older brother Gavin. Their family has been ranching here since the 1920’s.”

  Mrs. Hendrickson nodded politely to each of them as McLean introduced them in turn. Gavin just stared them down from under the brim of his ten-gallon hat as if he were gauging how much trouble they might cause.

  “Mary says she took care of my place for the first couple of days, and then Jim Mason arrived with his daughter. She spoke to them yesterday, and everything seems to be fine, although nobody else has made it up here yet.”

  They chatted for another minute with the Hendricksons about what the group had seen coming out of Denver, and what had happened up here in the mountains (which wasn’t much). They were eager to get to McLean’s ranch, so they soon excused themselves and continued on up the road. After a ten minute ride they came to the rail fence that marked the boundary of the two ranches, and seconds later they spotted McLean’s place.

  It was a two-story wooden structure with river rock on the lower part and a green aluminum roof. Situated off the road against some trees, it was surrounded by a sizable garden plot and a fenced area for small livestock. There was also an outbuilding big enough to hold a tractor and other necessary equipment for a mountain ranch.

  The house itself was not overly impressive on the outside, but McLean pointed out a few of its features to Carrie as they approached. “It may not look big, but I think you’ll be surprised at how roomy it is on the inside. It’s got a full basement. Of course, I call it roomy after living in it for two years alone. With more people, we’ll want to add on to it as soon as we can. I plan to redo the roof within the next few years. And add more solar panels.”

  The left the road and walked their horses down the drive toward the house just as the light was fading from the sky. It felt so good to finally arrive at their destination and find it intact that Carrie almost wanted to cry. McLean couldn’t stop grinning.

  “Mister Jim, where you at?” JD hollered. “We’re here, man! And we’re hungry!”

  The door of the cabin opened and Jim, a tall man in a red and black flannel shirt and jeans, stepped out. He held a rifle in one hand, and rested it on the porch as he looked the riders over. “Didn’t think you were ever gonna make it!” he exclaimed. “Steph and I were about to hunker down for the winter without you.”

  “Hey, man, we were just delayed a few days, that’s all,” JD snorted, dismounting. “How did you get up here so quick?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you all about it,” Jim replied. “Over some venison chili. Sound good?”

  DJ rubbed his stomach. “I didn’t know you could cook, Jim. You truly are a handy man to have around.”

  “He didn’t cook it,” McLean said, taking Carrie’s reins and helping her dismount. “I canned it myself last Fall.”

  Jim grinned. “It’s good, too. Anybody else coming? You didn’t run into any trouble that might have followed you up here, did you?”

  “Plenty of trouble, but none following us,” McLean said.

  Jim waved to a clump of trees on the north side of the house. “Come on out, Steph. We’re good!”

  A teenaged girl with sandy hair rose out of the grass at the foot of the trees where she had lain hidden. She was holding an AR-15 with a scope.

  “Whoa,” Carrie breathed, leaning closer to McLean. “Didn’t see that coming.”

  McLean nodded as the girl walked up to the porch. “Jim’s no fool. And neither is his daughter. We made sure of that, back when we were vetting everyone for inclusion in our group. If anybody with hostile intentions comes up this road, they won’t find any easy targets.” McLean introduced Carrie to the Masons.

  “Stephanie will be glad to have another woman in the house,” Jim told Carrie. “Our little network happens to be mostly male, and I don’t think Steph was looking forward to life with a clan of roughnecks.”

  Stephanie smiled and hefted the rifle on her hip. “I already made a list of house rules. You can help me enforce them, Ms. Alton.”

  “I’d be happy to, Stephanie,” Carrie said. “I hope regular showers is on the list. These men I’ve been traveling with have barely splashed in a creek during the last week.”

  JD grunted on his way to the kitchen. “I splashed in several, thank you very much. And got rained on, which should be enough to last a while.”

  “You all go on inside and relax,” McLean told the rest. “I’ll fix up the horses and then I’m going to check over everything. Save me some chili, though.”

  The others went in and started dinner. Carrie noted that the place was indeed roomy inside for such a small ranch cabin. There were three bedrooms upstairs, a large common room and a kitchen down, and screened back porch attached to the kitchen. The basement was one big room, mostly taken up by food storage and some exercise equipment.

  It was all well-maintained and surprisingly tidy, if a little spartan. There was some cowboy art on the walls and a few attempts at comfort, but most of the rooms were purely functional.

  Once they got some chili heated up over the woodburning stove in the kitchen, Stephanie passed around bowls and glasses of water as everyone gathered around the kitchen table.

  “This is good,” Carrie said after tasting the chili. “Spicy, but good. So, Stephanie and Jim, where are you from?”

  “We live-- lived, I guess-- on the western outskirts of Columbine,” Stephanie said. “So when things started going crazy, we were pretty close to the mountains. My dad’s jeep still ran, and we got almost all the way here before it quit.”

  “Yup,” Jim said. “After my wife died, I moved us out there and got into survival and disaster preparedness. Steph said I was being paranoid, but she’s on my side now, aren’t you, Steph? Being close to the mountains and having a ruggedized jeep made all the difference, just like I thought it would.”

  “Lucky,” DJ said. “You missed out on all the excitement.”

  “Yeah, and we’re still in the dark,” Jim replied. “So how about you tell us what you’ve been through, and I’ll add my side of the story when McLean comes in.”

  DJ and Carrie took turns summing up their adventures getting out of Denver and through the mountains. JD kept his mouth too full to contribute more than the occasional grunt. McLean came in as they were finishing up with the tale of DJ spraining his ankle on the mountain, catching the horse thief, and hunting along the trail to the ranch.

  “Wow,” Jim said. His daughter was silent, and looked forlorn. “So I guess there’s really no going back any time soon.”

  “It’s not just a matter of not going back,” DJ said. “We may need to lie low and even defend this place eventually. The violence and destruction we saw was only the beginning. Within just a few days there were already marauders controlling the highways. I can only imagine what I-70 is like. We’re going to have either get comms up soon, or send out constant scouting parties to keep tabs on what’s going on down below.”

  “But we don’t know for sure what the future will bring,” Carrie said, placing a comforting hand on Stephanie’s shoulder. “We’ll just take one day at a time, and maybe sooner than we all think we’ll be able to connect back up with other people.” She didn’t go as far as to suggest returning to the city. But the thought of friendly neighbors in the mountains around them helped provide a sense of normality to the post-apocalyptic situation they now found themselves in.

  Jim filled them in on what he and his daughter had done. On the morning of the EMP, Stephanie had been at school and Jim had been working at a house in Littleton. When the power went dead and he couldn’t get through to anyone or anything with his phone, he packed up and headed home. After realizing that all the cars were disabled, he started to get really nervous, and walked as quickly as he could to Stephanie’s school with the
pack from his truck.

  He found her in her classroom, sheltering in place with all the other students and teachers, who were trying to figure out why buses and phones weren’t working and what was going on. He notified them of the smoke columns coming from downtown and the catastrophic traffic situation, and then took Stephanie with him. They walked home and tried to get some news on the radio. A neighbor arrived, having biked home from work, and reported shooting and looting. That was when Jim decided it was time to get out.

  Although the jeep in his garage did have trouble starting at first, he fiddled with some fuses and got it to start. They loaded it up with everything they had, including their mountain bikes, and drove into the mountains on the lesser-used, mostly clear southern highway. They were within fifteen miles of the ranch when the second EMP burst later that afternoon. Jim couldn’t get the jeep to do anything after that, so they cached the supplies they couldn’t carry and hid the jeep. Then they biked the rest of the way to the ranch.

  “We spoke to Mrs. Hendrickson a few times, and did our best to take care of the animals and the garden,” Jim said. “But honestly, we’ve been getting more and more concerned that nobody made it out of Denver alive.”

  McLean finished his chili. “You did good. The place is in remarkably good shape, and I think we’re all going to be okay up here. As for making it out of Denver, I think we’ll eventually see most of our friends. The attacks don’t seem to have been aimed at killing everyone. If they wanted to do that, whoever these bad guys are, they could have used the nukes for something other than EMP. I think they were trying to destabilize everything, cause a lot of chaos and mayhem, and prevent an effective response from authorities. It seems to have worked. The question is, why? And we won’t know that for a long, long time.”

  They spent the rest of the evening talking and planning together. Now that they were finally in their place, they needed to prepare to defend it, to kick the garden into full production mode, and establish a routine of work. McLean assigned DJ responsibility for communications and intelligence until their other experts arrived, and to try his best to get contact with someone on the radio.

  He assigned Carrie charge of the house, the kitchen, and everything medical. Stephanie would feed the animals, take turns watching the road, and keep in touch with the Hendricksons. JD was going to get a proper corral up for the horses, then a covered stable, and then begin on an extension of the house. Jim and McLean had a lot of work to do to get the plumbing, irrigation, electrical, and other systems up and running as well as trying to get the tractor to start so they could make hay.

  There was a lot to do to prepare for the arrival of the rest of their network and whatever else might be headed their way. Winter would be upon them in a matter of weeks, so there was food and fuel to put away before the early snows hit.

  And once they got all of that handled, there was the specter of their nation’s downfall looming over everything. For all they knew, the whole world was in disarray, and sooner or later they needed to do something about it.

  END of Part One of the Denver Burning series: Get Out of Denver

  Sneak peek at Part Two of the Denver Burning series: Take Back Denver

  “EMP’s don’t take out cars,” Jim said, arguing with DJ and JD after lunch. “Cars aren’t big enough to conduct the energy. Not unless they’re electrics that are plugged in to the power grid when it goes off.”

  “Then what do you call that thing, whatever-it-was that took everything out?” JD countered. “What else could zap every car, every cell tower, every backup generator at once?”

  Jim just shook his head.

  “Seems like whoever it was that triggered it knew what they were doing,” DJ said. “Knew something the government didn’t about how to maximize an EMP’s impact on all targets.”

  “We may never know,” Jim admitted.

  DJ held up a finger. “Actually, I intend to find out. I may be a gimp at the moment, but there’s one thing I can still do just fine, and that’s gather intel. Somebody in this country knows what happened and who was behind it. Once you get the ham radio up and running, I’m going to start putting out feelers.”

  Carrie walked by with a basket full of laundry. “All right, gentlemen, back to work. I’m not scrubbing all these clothes by hand just so you can sit around pontificating.”

  “Slave driver!” Jim muttered teasingly. He dodged a wet sock that Carrie threw, then sauntered out the door to continue his efforts on the radio antenna.

  “What’s pontificating?” JD asked. “Is it like… you know, what you do in the outhouse?”

  “For some people, yeah,” Carrie replied, mouth splitting into a grin. “Now get going.”

  JD left scratching his head, and went up to the pasture to see how McLean was getting along with the irrigation project.

  They had been working hard for a week. Already they had doubled the garden in size, gotten a shelter built for the horses, and shifted the supplies in the basement around to make a few private sleeping nooks for those that didn’t fit in the upstairs bedrooms.

  They had quickly settled into a working routine, and were mainly just happy to be off the road and have a roof over their heads. It was an adjustment for some of them to share living quarters with several other adults, but everyone was respectful and disciplined. McLean insisted they all get up at first light or before and work hard until after dark. Nobody complained, at least not seriously.

  Stephanie came running up the road shortly after lunch, waving her arms to get the attention of anyone working outside. She held up two fingers and gestured down the road. McLean and JD grabbed their rifles, always close to hand when working away from the house. After giving a shout to those inside to get ready, they ran to meet the teenaged girl.

  “Two people coming, about a mile from the Hendrickson’s place,” Stephanie said between gasps of breath. “A man and a woman. They look nice enough, but the man did have a handgun on his hip. They’re on foot, with backpacks.”

  McLean nodded. “Good work. Can you describe them? Age, hair color, build?”

  Stephanie patted the binoculars around her neck. “Sure. They both look Hispanic, dark hair and brown skin. The woman is pretty slim and has long hair. The man’s hair is graying. They look like they’re in their late forties.”

  JD looked at McLean. “Sounds like the Barros’.”

  McLean agreed. “Sure does. You’re confident there’s no one else behind them, Steph?”

  “No one. I watched for another couple minutes to make sure, before I came back.”

  They sent Stephanie to the house to let everyone else know, and walked down to the gate they’d installed across the road, to wait for the newcomers to arrive.

  They could tell it was indeed their friends the moment they spotted the couple. Maria and Gordo Barros had joined the network late, but brought an immense skillset to the team. Maria was a doctor specializing in cardiology, and her husband was a radiologist. He had grown up on a farm and was integral to the group’s long-term agricultural aspiration.

  Maria waved a hand in greeting. When they got close, McLean opened the gate for them. “Welcome! We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “That was a very, very long walk,” Gordo said, breathing a long sigh and shaking hands with the men. “I didn’t think we were ever to get here.”

  Maria nodded wearily. “Gordo made us bushwhack through the forest most of the way. My pants are nearly shredded from all the branches and rocks.”

  “That was wise,” McLean told them. “We saw some terrible things on the roadways. You’d have needed an army to get through.”

  They went up to the ranch house where the pair were welcomed by everyone. After they’d had a drink and a sandwich, they told the tale of their journey.

  They had both stayed at their hospital for a few days, trying to ease the strain and do what they could for the flood of victims coming in. Without power, though, Gordo couldn’t do any x-rays and Maria’s hands w
ere tied when it came to anything more serious than a flesh wound, for which there were already plenty of nurses. After the fourth day the number of patients dropped as people began to shelter in their homes and venture out less frequently. It seemed that society was beginning to realize they were on their own, and they’d have to start solving their own problems with what they had on hand.

  Maria and Gordo returned home that night to find their house broken into and much of their equipment missing. They walked to the house of another family that were members of the group, the Baileys. On the way they were forced to hide in an abandoned building to avoid a firefight that broke out on the street between two groups of thugs. When they finally got to the Baileys’ house, they found the family already gone, and realized if they were going to get out, now was the time.

  Ragged military forces had surrounded Denver on the west and weren’t letting anything out, but the Barros’ managed to slip through at night during a change in the guard patrols. Once they got into the hills they had smooth sailing until they hit the Breckenridge resort area and had some of the same troubles as McLean’s group with thieves and bullies that had taken over many of the cabins in the area. Gordo had to face down a guy who pulled a knife on them; his pistol sent the man running for his life without needing to fire a shot. The last two days of their journey had been uneventful, as they had stayed in the backcountry.

  “Well, thank heaven you made it all right,” Jim said. “We need you here. But I wonder what happened to the Baileys?”

  “No idea,” Maria said. “We found no indication at their home of where they were headed. We assumed they’d be here.”

  “Maybe we should mount an expedition to find them,” DJ suggested.

  “Let’s give it another day or two,” McLean replied. “See if we can at least figure out a starting point. Maybe somebody on the radio will have seen them.”

  The others agreed, and spent several more minutes bringing Maria and Gordo up to speed and integrating them into their plans for the immediate future.