More shots went off. Randall heard Thomas’s rifle bark again, followed by another brief cry of intense pain. Randall assumed they had temporarily shifted the numbers to their favor.
Then he heard another rifle open up, to his right. He swore loudly as rounds whizzed past him and slammed into the trunk of the tree next to him.
He swung around to put the tree fully between him and the new gunman. At the same time, he saw an old Chevy Blazer in a homemade camouflage paint job turn off the road and down the driveway. Thomas needed to move, fast.
Randall edged around the other side of the tree, trying to catch a glimpse of the man who’d just shot at him, but couldn’t find him. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Thomas signaling the man’s location for him.
Randall beckoned his brother to break for it as soon as he got the chance, and started searching the area Thomas had indicated in earnest.
Randall finally saw movement. It felt like it took forever to get his M1A aimed at it, and even longer to gently pull the trigger back while he held the weapon steady.
Finally, the gun went off and he let the recoil of it push his shoulder back, pivoting on his left foot to get back behind the cover of the tree.
He heard the grunt of his target as the round slammed into him, but any sense of victory was shattered when he realized the Blazer was tearing through the homestead’s yard, between himself and Thomas.
“Surrender! Surrender!” somebody was yelling over the sound of several more guns going off.
Randall saw one person firing from the passenger side of the Blazer while the driver shouted.
Three more men had dismounted and were firing towards Thomas’s position. Thomas made eye contact with Randall and signaled for him to run.
“Just give up!” the driver of the Blazer yelled again.
Randall started to take aim when two of the dismounted gunmen opened up on him.
Thomas signaled for Randall to run again.
“You don’t have to die!” the driver of the Blazer shouted.
“OK! OK!” Thomas called out.
He held his rifle by the fore grip, showing it from behind his cover.
“Cease fire!” the man in the Blazer called out.
Randall noticed that the two men who’d fired on him had turned their attention to Thomas. He had to do the uncomfortable math again.
They were willing to take his brother alive, so the best thing to do was make sure only one of them got captured.
The sun had gone down far enough now that he could barely see into the woods behind him.
So he ran.
Chapter Five
The Woods of North Idaho
The next twelve hours passed in a complete blur for Randall.
For the first few hours, he thought he could hear the sound of pursuit behind him, and of a vehicle on the road flanking and running ahead of him.
The first time the road dipped down towards the bottom of the valley, he crossed it, and went up the ridgeline. He hoped his pursuers would assume he’d stay along the river, and keep chasing along there.
By dawn, it seemed like it had been a wise choice, as he hadn’t heard anybody around him, and the Blazer passed below him several times, running back and forth.
A little bit after sunrise, the vehicle traffic stopped. Instead of feeling a sense of relief, that lit a fire under Randall.
He wasn’t sure if it meant they’d gotten the location of the Priest Lake cabin out of Thomas or not, but he knew that he had to get there as fast as he could now to get alert any family that had made it there to the potential threat, and to try and get together a rescue.
It was late morning when he finally caught sight of Priest Lake. Ever since early childhood, he’d always adored the first glimpse of the lake.
It always meant at least a weekend, if not a couple of weeks, with his grandparents running through the woods and swimming in the crystal clear, cold water, usually with some of his cousins.
At that moment, though, that lake meant safety to him even if it was fragile. He hadn’t remotely felt this safe since the EMP. As exhausted as he was, he knew he couldn’t just walk up to the front door of the cabin.
If any of his family had made it to the cabin, they’d be extremely suspicious of anybody they saw approaching, so he’d have to make it obvious who he was. On the other hand, most of the people that lived and thrived up in this rural part of Idaho were strong-willed and independent.
Folks with those kinds of forceful personalities tended to bond tightly or hate each other. Most of the people that had property on the lake were friendly towards each other, but not everybody, and there was no telling what kinds of cracks the situation might have opened up between people.
Randall took great care keeping well out of sight of any of the other homesteads until he hit the narrow draw that would bring him up behind his family’s cabin.
He knew that his grandparents kept game cameras along the best approaches towards the house, but those would have all been rendered useless by the EMP.
As he carefully made his way down the draw that he’d been running through for as long as he could remember, he noticed a tripwire attached to a small, homemade Tannerite flashbang.
Randall was pleased to recognize the contraption as something he’d posted on his blog about a year ago.
After carefully stepping over the wire he got out his binoculars. Unlike the abandoned homestead where Thomas had been captured, the grass around the Priest Lake cabin was mowed.
A few windows were open, laundry was on the line, there was no clutter around. Finally, he caught site of somebody walking around the place. It was his cousin, Jane, on patrol.
She was a tall, lanky girl who ran cross country in the fall, played volleyball in the winter, and then ran track in the spring.
She was dressed in hunting camouflage and carried an old Winchester 1894 .30-30 lever action rifle that had most of the finish worn off.
As much as he wanted to just run up and hug her, rushing out of the woods at her would be a terrible idea. Instead, he picked up a stick, and banged on a tree three times. He paused, and did it again.
That go her attention. She immediately brought the rifle up, sighting along the barrel, and started backing herself towards an abandoned red Honda ATV for cover.
“Who’s out there?” she called out.
There was movement in one of the cabin windows. “It’s me, Randall.”
Through his binoculars, Randall could see a huge smile break out on Jane’s face, and to her credit, she kept moving towards cover.
“You sound like him,” she said. “You alone?”
“I’m alone.”
“Let’s see you, then. Real slow like you taught us.”
“I didn’t teach you that. Robert did,” Randall said, naming his other cousin, and Jane’s older brother.
“Good catch. You still need to step out slowly, hands up.”
Randall held his rifle by the stock and held his arms up high as he walked out from the treeline. As soon as he was completely clear, he saw his cousin light up. She carefully set her Winchester down and came running up for a hug.
He heard the back door of the cabin open, and more family came out. His parents, Marcus and Susan, came out first, followed by his grandparents, Barry and Christine.
“It is so good to see you!” Randall said to his parents. “We were hoping you were up here when the EMP hit.”
“We…?” his father asked.
“Thomas and I,” Randall said.
The reminder of his brother suddenly dampened his excitement at seeing his parents. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Ten minutes later, Randall was at the dining room table. With some food in him, sitting in a soft chair, fatigue started setting in. Jane, her parents Bruce and Angela, his grandparents, and parents, were all gathered around.
His other cousin, Robert, had been visiting the cabin with his wife while on leave from the Army when the E
MP hit. That afternoon, the two of them were out hunting, and were expected back within the hour.
That put the entire family, minus Thomas, safely at the cabin. Randall quickly told them about their trek from Coeur d’Alene to the firefights, and Thomas’s subsequent capture.
“You did the right thing,” Barry reassured him. “You’d have just gotten yourself captured too, or killed, if you hadn’t high-tailed it when you got the chance. Sticking to the plan and getting up here was the best thing you could do.”
“I know,” Randall said, exhaustion starting to slur his words, “But it was so hard to leave him.”
“We know more about the threat to the south now,” Marcus said. “And we’ve got a better chance of rescuing Thomas as a group than you would on your own.”
“It’s the Compound, isn’t it?” Christine asked.
“They’re the only ones in the area that would have those kinds of numbers and several running vehicles,” Marcus replied.
“The Compound? What’s that?” Randall asked.
There was a round of surprised questions from the table that Randall, the famous survivalist and prepper blogger, didn’t know about it. “Everybody up here knows about them,” Christine said. “Most of them are ranchers, tradesmen, and retirees. Some farmers, some guys with white-collar jobs they could do remotely.”
The family filled them in on Butler’s community. As he got more details, he started to realize why he’d missed them entirely. The focus of his writing had always been primarily on individual, family, and homestead survival when things collapsed.
He researched and wrote extensively on how an extended family exactly like his could best prepare for the worst, and then survive it. Something on the scale of the Compound, which was more of a self-sustaining agricultural community, was outside the scope of all of his work, and therefore hadn’t pinged his radar.
About this time, Robert and Claire got home. After listening to Randall’s description of the two fights, he said, “Either they don’t spend much time on tactical training, or you and Thomas got real lucky.”
Robert was an infantry squad leader with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, out of Fort Carson, Colorado. He was built on the long and lanky model, tall and lean with the endurance to march for days instead of bulky and muscular.
Whenever he was home he would leave his sister and cousins with drills to practice. The family didn’t always do them as hard as Robert would have liked, but they found ways to have fun with it.
For Robert, as long as they practiced them at all, he was happy.
“For you and Thomas to come out on top when surprised and outnumbered, and then for you to get out alive when it was ten on two. If these guys from the Compound did any serious group training, the outcomes would have been a lot different.”
“We’ve got that going for us then,” Bruce said. He was broad and strong, sharing the same light brown hair and dark eyes as his son. His wife, Angela, was sitting beside him. Robert and Jane both got their height from her.
“We don’t know if they’ve got a group that can act as a quick reaction force,” Robert said.
“If they had anybody that good, they would have sent them out to chase down Thomas and I,” Randall said sleepily.
“Maybe. But when you got here, where was the family’s best warfighter, and did you have any way of getting a hold of him?” Robert asked, reminding Randall that he and Claire had been out hunting for most of the day.
“It’s safest to assume that you happened to face off against some of their weaker elements, and that they may have much better between us and Thomas.”
Everybody around the table nodded agreement.
“Grandma. You said the Compound offered you a buy-in last year. Do you have anything from them that might include a map or anything about the layout?” Robert asked.
Randall never heard his grandmother’s answer because he’d fallen asleep at the table.
“Son,” Barry said, poking him awake. “Go to bed. We’ll put a plan together and let you know when we’re ready to go.”
He went to one of the old Ford Jamboree RVs that the family kept parked behind the cabin precisely in case there were suddenly more guests or residents than there were available beds, and was asleep before his head ever hit the pillow.
He woke a few hours later to the sound of someone knocking on the RV’s door. He would have liked a lot more sleep, but it was enough to refresh him.
“Chow and mission brief in five. Rolling out right after that,” Robert said from outside. The mention of food made his stomach gurgle very loudly.
He’d burned through every single calorie he’d put into his body since Thomas’s capture, and even after putting away a decent lunch, he was still famished from the effort, and anticipation of even more work to come.
Around a late, the family filled Randall in on the plan. Christine used to visit the Compound’s little farmers’ market every few months, trading cash and fresh fish from Priest Lake for vegetables.
It gave them a little bit of insight on the layout of the compound, and a couple options for the most likely place that Thomas was being held.
In Robert’s manner of speaking, the rescue was going to be Lean and Mean, just Randall, Marcus, Bruce, Jane, Robert, and Claire were going after Thomas.
Susan, Barry, Christine, and Angela would stay at the cabin, on high alert to defend it if necessary. Their job was also to set up an emergency room of sorts, in case anybody came back badly wounded.
Both Robert and Randall had insisted that everybody in the family learn field first aid and CPR.
Susan had also gotten a basic EMT license, and used to run with the local volunteer ambulance crew a few days a month to keep her skills sharp.
In the more than three weeks since the EMP, the family members at the cabin had explored the immediate area quite extensively. They knew which neighbors were friendly and which to avoid, for about a five mile radius.
They also had enough bicycles for everybody on the rescue mission. As long as they could use the roads, they would make a lot better time than going on foot.
And with Thomas captured, they knew time was critical before he either gave up the homestead’s location, or died trying to protect the information.
Three of the rescuers (Robert, Claire, and Marcus) were armed with AR-15s, each of them the Ruger AR-556. Before the EMP had struck, the Ruger had been one of the highest quality budget AR-15s on the market.
Robert naturally preferred the AR platform since it was the civilian version of the M4 carbine he had trained with and used constantly as an infantryman.
Claire, his wife, used one as well so that she and Robert could both practice with and supply the same type of weapon. Robert, Claire, and Marcus each carried several spare magazines for their ARs either in chest rigs or in the pockets of their cargo pants.
Jane tried to talk Robert into letting her use one of the AR-15s, but Robert explained to her that she wasn’t as familiar with it as she was with the old Winchester .30-30 she used for hunting. A mission as important as Thomas’s rescue was not the right time to adopt a new weapon.
Randall stuck to his his beloved Springfield M1A in .308, and Bruce to his sporterized Springfield M1903 bolt action rifle in .30-06. Both Randall’s M1A and Bruce’s M1903 were outfitted with quality Leupold scopes, and this combined with the larger calibers made them superior choices than the AR-15s for anti-personnel use at long distances.
For sidearms, the family’s weaponry remained equally diverse: Randall kept his Colt 1911 and Beretta 92FS, Marcus packed a Glock 22 .40 caliber and Bruce a Colt 1911 .45 very similar to Randall’s, while Robert preferred the accuracy and stopping power of his Ruger GP100 .357 Magnum revolver with a 6 inch stainless barrel. Neither Jane or Claire was carrying a handgun.
Randall looked at his family with pride, they’d survived the EMP and were looking tight and strong. They needed a minimum of words to make their final preparations to head out and
rescue his brother.
But with the Compound having about two thousand residents, he knew they were facing a very rough day ahead.
He said a silent prayer that they would all make it back to the cabin alive when all was said and done.
They filled canteens and put energy bars and other snacks into their pockets, and each packed one of their precious supply of MREs.
Robert and Randall consulted the map one last time, verifying the best route for riding bicycles in the dark and where the two firefights with the Compound’s men had happened.
Dawn of Destruction Page 30
