EMP: Heading Home

by Harp, Wilson

  We stayed frozen in our hiding place as we watched in horror. Seven men stood around and caught their breath as they scanned the area. Several turned over the dead bodies and seemed to search them. Three men eventually lit up cigarettes and took long puffs as they smiled and laughed together. The man who fired the shots reenacted his moment of glory for several of the men.

  Fear gripped me as we stayed still and unobserved by them. I understood why a rabbit froze when it felt threatened. I felt sick, but also full of rage. I knew they would easily kill us if they knew we watched them, but I felt a coward for not avenging those men. But who were they? Maybe they were bandits who were guilty of theft and murder and this group was sent to hunt them down for their crimes. But the cavalier attitude of the men who swaggered and laughed made me suspect that wasn’t the case.

  After ten minutes, the men wandered off to the east and over the ridge. None of us moved or spoke for a few minutes more.

  “Do you think they’re gone?” asked Anne.

  I looked at Ted, grateful Anne asked the question.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But let’s stay still for a little while.”

  I saw fear in Ted’s eyes and that scared me as much as the scene which had just played out.

  We waited maybe another thirty minutes before Kenny finally stood up from where he had been kneeling.

  “I think they’re gone,” he said. “And we need to be, too. Those fellows might have some friends coming to look for them. And if nothing else, some carrion birds might start coming around and would draw attention."

  We stood and stretched and looked around. We didn’t speak about what we had witnessed, but we didn’t have to. The beginning leg of the journey was fraught with fear, but we were now in a place of true terror.

  “Do we follow the creek?” I asked.

  “I was planning on it, until we hit a road. But now I’m not sure if we should follow a road. I’m afraid there’ll be a lot of patrols,” Ted said.

  “What about moving at night?” Anne asked.

  “No. They have more of an advantage at night. They know the area and don’t have to move quietly. We need to move in the day, but carefully. At least we can see them in the day. At night we might just stumble into a camp or something.”

  Even with Ted’s warning about the night, we traveled until well after dusk. We found the road but stayed a good half mile from it. We used cover as well as we could even though it meant we traveled much slower than I would have liked.

  We had a cold camp in some scrub brush, and it was indeed a cold camp. The wind had picked up out of the north and even bundled up, I was cold. I slept as well as I could until Kenny and Anne woke me and Ted around 1AM. I pulled out some more pork and washed it down with the slushy water in my canteen.

  Our watch passed with no words. Each sound, each imagined movement had me terrified. When the sky lightened in the East, we woke the others and passed out some hardtack. We ate the bread as we gathered our belongings and started out for the day.

  “Anything on watch last night?” Kenny asked.

  “A few animals,” Ted said. “None too close, though.”

  “That’s good,” said Kenny. “Means there probably wasn’t other people moving around too much.”

  The temperature dropped through the day and the wind picked up. It didn’t help that the trees thinned out and we often found ourselves scrambling over open fields with no cover for miles. Around ten in the morning, we saw a patrol up on the road. Eight men with rifles over their shoulders walked down the middle of the highway. We saw them, well before they would have seen us, and stayed low in the tall grass until they had passed out of sight.

  Around two hours later, we saw a large silo near a cluster of trees. We desperately needed shelter and a place to rest, so we headed toward it. The silo was in bad shape. Many of the panels had rusted through and parts of the structure had fallen off. Ted and Kenny took out their binoculars and climbed to the top. They told me and Anne to wait at the bottom and watch for anyone coming from the road. About ten minutes later they descended.

  “We have patrols all around us,” Ted said. “I spotted four from where I was.”

  “I saw six, most up near the road,” Kenny added.

  “We can’t stay here,” I said. “If there’re that many patrols, someone will for sure use this place for shelter.”

  I pointed out the fairly fresh cigarette butts, some food wrappers and even a couple of bent shell casings in and around the silo.

  “It looks like they use this pretty regular,” Anne said.

  “Let’s move out into the field a bit,” Ted said. “We might have to move at night after all.”

  We headed toward the large field to the north. It had a large depression which Kenny had spotted on the tower. There was a three foot drop and it was probably fifty feet across from what I could tell. It was low enough so no one would see us unless they walked right up to the edge. Even then, the tall grass would make for good concealment.

  We settled in and ate a cold lunch. The wind was off of us, at least, and I took some rare down-time to air out some clothes. Kenny was busy with a needle and thread mending a tear in his backpack. Ted had his book out and was reading while Anne rested with her eyes closed. She could have been asleep, but somehow I doubted it.

  The afternoon passed and though I felt it was a waste at times, we did hear a vehicle move along the road. If any one of those patrols came our way, they could find us. My stomach knotted hard when I considered it.

  As the sun started to go down, a thick blanket of clouds rolled in and cast a gray pallor over the land. Ted got us to our feet and we started the slow, careful walk which would get us safely out of this heavily patrolled area.

  “If we aren’t safe following the road, what are we going to do?” I asked.

  “I think the only thing we can do is head east and get out of Miller’s territory. It’ll take us a lot longer, but it’s the only thing we can do.”

  We continued until about 1AM. We crawled along ditches, waited as patrols went by, and darted from cover to cover for hours. We finally stopped for the night between two shallow hills.

  “We need to dig a pit and make a fire,” Kenny said. “We’ll freeze without one tonight.”

  Ted grimaced. “We’ll risk it. But we have to make sure it is completely cold by morning. We can’t send up any smoke.”

  I pulled out my small shovel and started to dig with Kenny.

  “How far do you think we went today?” I asked.

  “Maybe six or seven miles,” he said.

  “It’ll take us weeks to get out of this area,” I said. “We have to move faster.”

  “It’s going to snow,” said Anne. “Maybe not tonight, but sometime soon and then we’ll be leaving tracks everywhere. We have to figure something out.”

  Ted started the fire as we got the pit dug.

  “I don’t like it, but you’re right. Tomorrow morning we travel as fast as we can to the east. If we get seen, we’ll just have to keep moving. Hopefully they won’t follow if they know we are heading away from them.”

  “Do we set watch tonight?” I asked.

  “No,” said Ted. “Just get warm, get fed, and get to sleep. Tomorrow we will have a big day and we need to be ready for it.”

  I woke as Ted kicked me awake with the side of his foot.

  “We have to be gone soon,” he said. “It’s almost dawn.”

  Kenny shoveled dirt on the coals of our fire and Anne stretched in the pre-dawn darkness. I gathered my pack and we started toward the east before the sky grew light.

  We had been walking for maybe an hour when we saw the farm. The first golden rays of sun had penetrated the grey skies and colored the world after a night of grays and black.

  We were headed right toward an outbuilding on the farm next to the main barn.

  “Let’s be careful,” Ted said.

  We stayed low and approached the rear of the building. We just want
ed to make sure there was nobody here to see us when we passed by.

  We had just reached an old tractor when a man stepped around the side of the building. He was a large man with a heavy full beard. He had on a heavy coat and a rifle slung over his back. He walked with his head down and turned toward the building without a glance our way. He unzipped his pants and started to pee when we heard someone call to him from inside the building. He answered back to a rough chorus of laughter.

  I felt my throat constrict. We had run into one of Miller’s patrols.

  Chapter 14

  I watched in horror as Ted slipped his rifle off his shoulder and chambered a round. Kenny pulled his rifle off of his shoulder as well, but I just watched the man as he relieved himself on the back wall of the beat up building.

  “Hold there!” someone shouted behind us. I whipped around and heard a loud blast.

  The man flew back into the grass and I threw myself to the ground.

  I saw Anne on her back, the shotgun she carried still in her hand. I reached to help her when I heard the sharp crack of a rifle. Screams and racket assaulted my ears and the smell of burning powder filled the air.

  Anne struggled to get up as I tried to help her. I couldn’t see if she had been hit when I realized she had been the one to fire the shotgun. She pushed me away as she got to her knees and swung her shotgun up to her shoulder.

  I looked behind me and saw the man who had surprised us lay crumpled in the field, his chest blasted open from Anne’s shot. The yells of my friends mixed with the sounds of gunfire brought me back to the moment. I raised my rifle to my shoulder and turned to the building.

  I heard a sharp ding as a bullet struck the tractor and saw a flash of fire from inside the building. I pointed the barrel of my rifle where I had seen the flash and fired.

  Then it was all silent.

  I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. Kenny and Ted watched the building, their rifles raised to their shoulders. I realized my rifle was in the same position, although not as steady as theirs.

  I felt Anne tap my shoulder. I turned and she motioned I should be quiet. My breath was coming in gasps and I made some sort of squeaky sound. I clamped my mouth shut and breathed deep through my nose.

  Anne held the shotgun at waist level and wisps of smoke drifted from the barrel. She stared hard at the building. They all did. I knew they were waiting in case there were others nearby, but I couldn’t look that way.

  Finally, I steeled myself and looked where it all started. The large man with the beard lay slumped against the corner of the building where he had stopped to relieve himself. The wall was solid red behind him and his clothing was soaked in his own blood.

  Ted motioned Kenny to follow and they slid around the side of the building. Anne and I watched until they signaled all was clear. We moved on unsteady legs from behind the tractor and joined them. As I cleared the side of the structure, I could see three more bodies. Ted and Kenny had shot them as they poured out from their camp. Ted looked around the other corner and crept forward.

  “I think we’re clear,” Ted said.

  We followed Ted around the front of the building. The other structures were in much worse shape which was why this one was picked by the patrol to bunk down in.

  It was a single room building with no windows and only the one door. The back wall was somewhat dilapidated with large cracks where the morning light worked its way in. There were sleeping bags and other gear strewn around. It was all coated in a thin veneer of blood.

  A young man with a rifle in his hands lay near the back wall. The back of his head was missing and there was a large seeping hole where one of his eyes had been.

  I fell to one knee and gagged as I tried not to vomit. It was the only shot I fired and I had taken his life. The flash I saw was this man attempting to kill me or my friends, but it didn’t change the fact that it was my choice which killed him.

  “Are you okay?” Ted asked. He half-carried, half-dragged me out into the opening between the buildings.

  I couldn’t answer and just heaved again. This time, I couldn’t stop the vomit.

  “Let him puke, man,” Kenny said. “I’m going to search their stuff.”

  As I lost what little breakfast was in me, I saw Anne on her knees near the corner of the building. She had the same reaction I had.

  “I’m sorry, Ted,” she said. “I’m just sorry.”

  “It happened, Anne. It’s okay.”

  “I heard a noise and he was behind us. I didn’t think, I just shot him. I just knew he was going to kill us.”

  “You’re right. If they hadn’t killed us, they would have taken us to Miller. Either way, we’d be dead. It was us or them.”

  “They’re all dead?” I asked.

  “Looks that way,” Ted said. “No sounds or movement.”

  “You guys get out of here,” Kenny said. “Almost done then I’ll catch up.”

  Ted helped Anne to her feet as I struggled to mine.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Anne. “And why do we have to move so quickly?”

  “The gunfire,” I said. “Any nearby patrols would have heard the gunfire.”

  “Kenny will catch up soon,” Ted said. “We just need to head east as fast as we can manage.”

  “The road,” said Anne. “We need to get to the road first.”

  “Why?” asked Ted.

  “Because the road won’t give them tracks to follow. We go tearing out across the fields straight from here, they’ll find us for sure.”

  “Kenny,” Ted yelled into the building. “We’re hitting the highway. We’ll turn off to the east at the first access road north of here.”

  We headed down the dirt road from the farm at a trot. It was less than a mile to the highway, but we didn’t know where any other patrol might be. We were sure anyone who had heard the gunfire would have assumed an armed patrol would have been able to handle whatever situation they were up against. It was just pure dumb luck we found ourselves on the run from a gunfight with six dead soldiers left behind.

  We were on the road for just a few minutes when I heard Kenny’s steps catching up to us.

  “What’d you find?” Ted asked.

  “Not much. Didn’t search too hard. Got maybe a hundred rounds.”

  “Any magazines we can use?”

  “No, we’ll ditch them tonight when we unload them.”

  “Why’d you grab ammo?” Anne asked. “We have plenty, don’t we?”

  “You never have enough ammo,” I said. I wasn’t sure why, but I had always heard my dad say it whenever my mom said he had enough.

  “That’s right,” said Ted. “You always want to carry more than you think you’ll need. Besides, it’s useful in other ways.”

  “And on top of that,” said Kenny, “when Miller’s men find the bodies, they’ll take note that the ammo is gone. It’ll buy us time. They’ll be concerned about a group of armed men. I tore up the place, too, and messed up our tracks. Hopefully they’ll be looking for a larger group.”

  We trotted down the road for another thirty minutes until we came to an access road which headed east. I couldn’t believe I was tired, exhausted, hungry, and now on the run as a hunted fugitive in a land where the law couldn’t help me, but would likely hang me.

  We traveled to the east for about a mile before we found a small stream which cut across the road. The rocky bed hid our tracks to the north for another half mile before we cut back across the fields to the east.

  “They’ll have to use dogs or have one heck of a good tracker to find us,” said Kenny. “Just glad it’s not snowing.”

  “Me too,” said Ted. “But we need to keep moving because we’ll get snow eventually.”

  We stopped at the edge of a lightly wooded area where we saw some small buildings in the distance.

  Ted stopped us and pulled out his binoculars.

  “They have to have found the bodies by now,” he said. “I just hope we’ve lost them before
the search starts.”

  “They probably have started the search up and down the road,” said Kenny. “Maybe even backtracked us to our camp from last night.”

  “We haven’t seen or heard any vehicles,” Anne said.

  “What?” asked Ted.

  “All of our time on the highway and walking along the creek bed, we would have heard a vehicle close by.”

  “Or horses,” I added.

  “Yeah,” said Ted. “I assume at least some of the patrols would have radios. They would’ve called in for vehicles or horses to start a search.”

  “They’ve decided to organize first,” Kenny said. “They’ll be coming.”

  I could see Ted’s mind work out the problem as he turned his binoculars in each direction.

  “They’ll set up a perimeter,” he said. “They know we’re on foot, that’ll determine how far we can go and then they’ll close the net.”

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  “Those buildings,” said Kenny. “They can’t be more than a mile from here. Maybe we can find someplace to hide.”

  “Or maybe we’ll run smack into a whole group of people,” Anne said.

  “I think we need to risk it,” said Ted. “Just hope they aren’t waiting there.”

  We made our way through the wooded area and toward the buildings. The grass was just over waist high, so we ran as crouched as we could. I was glad Ted had specified the colors for our coats and backpacks. The tan and black one I wore stood out much less than the orange one I wanted to bring. I never considered I might need to hide from prying eyes eager to kill me. I’m glad Ted had considered it.