Dawn of Destruction

by Ronald Williams

  At the busiest of times, the road got almost no traffic. It was nothing uncommon for them to see only a handful of vehicles per day on it.

  With presumably most motor vehicles disabled, they did not expect to see any trucks, but still kept their eyes out for foot traffic – which would be a lot quieter – as well as wild animals.

  It was not uncommon for them to see bears and big cats around the cabin, and their encounter the night before had them jumpy at any sound at all coming from the brush.

  When they got close enough to see the cabin, their hearts fell when they saw the truck was not there.

  Neither of them truly expected to see it, but there was still some odd little hope in them that somehow their parents had managed to avoid the event or somehow get the truck running and get back across the lake.

  They still made a very cautious approach to the cabin, just in case their parents or somebody else had gotten in while they were gone. The two shots they’d fired off the night before made them nervous.

  It advertised their presence, where they would have preferred to be as low key as possible until their parents got back.

  “We need to set up tells, and some sort of alarms if we can,” Jenny said as they started up the driveway.

  She was pale and moving very slowly. Even with taking most of Cole’s water after they’d refilled their canteens at the creek, she was still terribly thirsty and had just stopped sweating.

  After having been through a severe case of the chills from shock the night before, the unseasonably warm day was starting to get to her, even so close to dawn.

  “We need to get you properly cleaned up and your dressings changed first.”

  “Right,” she said, nodding her head and continuing to put one foot in front of the other. At first, she shook off the steadying hand that Cole offered her, but after her first good stumble she grabbed his arm and leaned into him while they walked.

  The cabin was still locked, and a quick look at the front, at least, showed no broken windows or other obvious signs that anybody had gotten in that way.

  Cole considered going around back to be sure, but Jenny really needed to lay down and get some water into her.

  Once she was hydrating, Cole heated up some water on the propane cook stove, then gave Jenny some privacy to clean up while he cracked into the wilderness medicine book.

  Because of the risk of very bad infection from trapping dirt inside the wound, Cole was glad he hadn’t used the Quikclot on it right away, but the fact that at least one of the slashes still hadn’t stopped bleeding him was troublesome.

  The book did have instructions on how to suture a wound, but he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to try something like that.

  Even after Jenny came out of the bedroom holding a gauze pad over her wounds, blood already showing through it, he consigned that to his last resort option.

  She laid back on the sofa while Cole applied more pressure to the wounds, and looked over the instructions for treating deep lacerations.

  In the end, she wasn’t keen on getting stitched up by an amateur either, but both recognized it might come to that.

  Since the wounds had been washed twice, with a treatment of antibiotic salve both times, they decided to take a risk on the Quikclot.

  Cole boiled some water and let it cool until it was barely tolerable to touch. He gloved up again, and tried his best to be gentle while he thoroughly washed the gashes once more.

  This time, he did not put any antibiotic salve directly on the wounds, but did lay a light layer on the skin immediately around them.

  Once he got the Quikclot bandages on, he covered them over with another layer of fresh gauze, then folded a pillow case over all of that, and bound the whole package up tight.

  “Let me check your temp, JJ,” he told her, digging a thermometer out of the first aid kit and handing it to her while he started cleaning up.

  She was running a slight fever, but at least the wounds hadn’t shown any immediate signs of infection – no foul or off smells, no unusual discharge, and no redness or heat radiating out from the cuts.

  “Maybe you’re still cooling down from the walk up,” he said, getting her a fresh glass of water.

  His next task, once he saw his sister eating and drinking, was to start figuring out how to set up something around the cabin to let them know if anybody was coming onto the property.

  They owned about twenty acres of hillside, but only the small patch immediately around the cabin was cleared. The rest of the property, and most of the land around it, was forested.

  Over the years, Cole and Jenny had criss-crossed it with trails. Some were just game trails they followed often enough to widen them up a bit. Others were intentionally cut through the undergrowth for mountain biking.

  Cole figured that anybody coming to the cabin, especially if they were going to come at night, would naturally gravitate to these easy routes.

  He wished desperately that they had set up game cameras out on the land, even though he wasn’t sure if they’d still be functioning after the EMP or not.

  The past few years, intermittent droughts had left things dry enough up in the area that they had to be cautious about fires outside.

  Not only small evening bonfires for the family to gather around, but even sometimes using their charcoal grill was too much of a risk.

  That summer had been one of them, so even if Cole could rig up some sort of trip flare with a mousetrap and the powder from one of the rifle bullets or something, he figured that would be a terrible idea.

  Still, they did have mousetraps. They had a lot of fishing tackle, and assorted tools, fixtures, and other odds and ends.

  “How you feeling, JJ?” Cole asked, after coming in from a trip around the property to get a good look at how many trails were out there.

  “Better. Not as hot, and the ibuprofen is working a little bit to take the edge off the pain.”

  “Still bleeding?”

  She lifted up her shirt to look at the bandages. “Nothing’s bleeding through Mount Bandage here.”

  “OK. I’m going to need your help with something. Your brains and your hands.”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” Jenny said, tapping the side of her head.

  “I’m still the better looking one,” Cole said.

  “Which will help us out how?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet. But what I have figured out is that we have fourteen different trails on the property that I want to cover somehow. I don’t know if there’s a way to set an alarm of some sort with what we’ve got.” He gave her the quick inventory of stuff he’d identified as being potentially useful.

  “Out in the shed,” Jenny said. “We’ve got the empty bottles and cans and garbage we’ve made over the past couple of weeks. Plus more full bottles and cans in the pantry that we can empty out if we can safely repackage the food.”

  “Noise makers?” Cole asked.

  “Pretty much. I don’t think we could make anything super loud, but it might give us a bit of advance warning. Even if we did set something up that would let us know if something had crossed a trail. If somebody was just scouting about, we’d be able to tell they’d been here at least.”

  “Couldn’t they just reset the trap?”

  “Not if we make it a huge pain in the ass to do so in daylight, so it would be impossible to do quietly at night,” Jenny said.

  Cole considered this.

  “Or, if we set something up that couldn’t be reset at all, like if the trap physically breaks something,” Jenny continued.

  “So how would we design it?”

  “Give me one of those mouse traps,” Jenny said.

  After an hour of trying things out, they figured out something that worked inside the cabin. A trip wire would trigger the mouse trap, and that would release a catch that could drop something else. Cole brought in the bags of trash, and they tied several empty bottles and cans to a length of fishing line.

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p; They tested their first trap, with the noise maker bundle thrown over a tree branch twenty feet up.

  The trip line worked exactly as they’d intended, and the tumble of garbage was enough to startle Cole, but most of the sound was swallowed up by the woods, and Jenny was able to hear it quietly from inside the cabin.

  “It’s not a perfect system, but it might help,” Cole said.

  “There’s no way that would wake either of us up at night.”

  “Well, I don’t think we’re going to be both sleeping at the same time for quite a while now. There should always be one of us up and moving around. Especially after dark.”

  “So fifty-percent guard, as dad would say?”

  While Cole went to reset the first trap, Jenny started tying more noisemakers.

  It was near nightfall on the second day that they had put at least something across each of the trails onto the property.

  It was good for Cole to have a reason to go out and put a critical eye on the grounds as he looked for the best places on each trail to set the trap.

  He started to think about which routes he would take to get to the cabin, noting where he could and could not be easily seen from the doors and windows.

  He decided that his task for the next day would be to find a way to map out those places with Jenny, so they could figure out how to handle them.

  Dinner that night was late and cold, nothing exciting. The cabin had solar panels up on the roof, but the EMP seemed to have fried the circuitry in the battery chargers attached to it.

  They had a small supply of non-rechargeable batteries for their flashlights and LED lanterns, and some fuel for their gas lanterns, but both were in very finite supply. They still didn’t feel like eating in darkness, so they turned on one a single LED lantern on its lowest power setting.

  “Best thing to do is to assume we’re in it for the long haul, and find ways to use as little fuel as possible,” Jenny said.

  “We’ve got the wood stove, too,” Cole said.

  “Smoke. Unless we’re burning very dry wood, there will be smoke. And even a dry wood fire will still have a smell.”

  “Well, if we’re in it for the long haul, we need to be prepared to keep this place warm. We’ll be getting our first frost soon, so we’ll need to start heating this place with the wood stove.”

  “True,” Jenny said. “We should ration the seasoned wood we already have, and start stockpiling more now. Dead wood still on the tree is going to be best. We may need to consider only heating the place at night, as long as we can hold out that way.”

  “Would we only cook at night, too?”

  “Probably. But I also remember reading something a while ago that will help stretch our fuel supply. Tonight while I’m up on guard, I’ll start working on a haybox. It’s really just an insulated box, an old way of cooking when fuel was in short supply. Put all the ingredients into a container, get it up to boiling, then stuff the container into the insulated box, and let it finish cooking by its own residual heat.”

  “Great,” Cole said. “But that does bring us to the next thing to consider, which is food in general. Assuming it’ll be just us.”

  He paused then, for the first time admitting out loud that he was doing survival math was for two, not four.

  “We could live on what we’ve got in the cabin for at least six weeks, longer if we stay in good health and go on lighter rations. Most of the food we’ve got is shelf-stable, but we’re going to need to think about supplementing it.”

  Jenny nodded. “I had been thinking about that, too. Big game is out if we’d like to avoid the sound of gunfire as much as possible. Hunting well away from the cabin would be less likely to reveal its location, but the farther we are from here, the greater the risks. Even if we did go for big game, we don’t have the means to really process and preserve it. Smoking uses a lot of wood and makes a ton of smoke and odor.”

  “Let’s research air dehydrating or other methods. Plus, in winter, we’ll have natural cold to preserve meat,” Cole said. “In the meantime, we’ve got one old snare in the garage, and we’ve got the survival books. Those will have instructions on how to build our own snares and traps for smaller game.”

  “We could fish down in the creek, too.”

  “Once we really get the situation figured out, maybe at the lake as well. Better chances there.”

  “Looks like we’ve both got a lot of reading to do. And a lot of work over the next few days.”

  Chapter 9

  “Damn, damn, damn!” Bill cursed. “I was hoping we could get across the lake fast, before anything got organized.”

  “They’re not completely set up,” Sally said. “They only had a local deputy at Rexford, which is how we slipped the net there. We’ve still got some time to get across if we can figure something out fast.”

  Bill looked out over the still water of the lake.

  There was a boat on a trailer and four kayaks over at the cabin, which wasn’t doing them any good at all on the east side of the lake.

  They hadn’t encountered any boats as they’d come along the shoreline.

  As Patten had warned them, it was steep in a lot of places, and there were no decent landings between Rexford and the bridge where somebody could get a trailer down to the water. The few homes on that part of the lake were a couple hundred feet uphill from the water.

  He thought back, trying to remember any details from his drives along Highway 37 over the years they’d had the cabin.

  There was no shortage of canoes and kayaks mounted to vehicle roof racks all over the area.

  Many of the homes also had at least one or two small boats in a shed or leaned up against the side of the house.

  “Maybe it’s time to get a little bit dishonest,” Bill said.

  “How so?” Sally asked.

  Twenty minutes later, they were carefully approaching the first house to the north.

  The farther they were from a known concentration of troops when they crossed the lake, the better, so they had started backtracking towards Rexford.

  Before they got within two hundred feet, of the house, though, they heard a dog start barking.

  “This one’s out…” Sally said, as she and Bill slowly backed themselves down the hill and out of sight of the house’s windows.

  They had no idea if night vision equipment would have survived the event, but didn’t want to find out the hard way if the homeowner had a functioning scope on a rifle.

  Two more houses north, and they found a possible candidate to approach more closely.

  Even in the darkness, they could pick up the too-neat feel of the yard and the kitschiness of weekenders as opposed to a full-summer or year- round family.

  The place simply didn’t look lived in, even though the lawn was mowed there were toys and patio furniture in the yard. There wasn’t a vehicle in the driveway, which boded well for the place being empty.

  Bill hoped it meant the family had been in town when the event happened, and had been swept up when the law and military started rounding people up. Still, they took no chances as they hugged the tree line and looked in on the place with their binoculars.

  “Curtains open all over the place. If they were home, they’d shut them up, right?” Sally asked.

  “I assume so. We close ours at night.”

  “Think it’s worth a shot?”

  Bill looked at his watch. It was four in the morning, and dusk would be breaking soon.

  He wasn’t sure they’d be able to get anything down to the water and across the lake before daylight, but also didn’t want to just cool his heels for another full day on the east side of the lake instead of moving tangibly closer to their goal.

  “Yeah. Best chance we’ve had or are likely to get.”

  They crept up to the side of a small outbuilding, white with cute blue window trim and scalloped eaves.

  There were three kayaks inside, two singles and a double, along with paddles, life jackets, and fishing gear.<
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  “Bust a window?” Bill asked.

  “Not if we can avoid it,” Sally said, looking around.

  There was no way either of them would be able to crawl in through the small side window, much less push a kayak out through it.

  “Here,” she said, picking up a long metal poker beside the steel fire pit in the middle of the yard.

  With a little bit of finagling, she got the poker wedged into the hasp of the padlock on the door, and after a couple of attempts, got just the right leverage to pop it open.

  Bill and Sally darted back behind the shed as fast as they could while still being reasonably silent, and waited, listening to see if the noise had gotten any obvious response.

  After a couple of minutes, they went inside the shed and took a couple of life jackets off of their hooks.

  “Grab two singles or the double?” Sally asked.

  Bill chewed on that thought for a moment. “Singles. If anything happens to one of us on the crossing, the other still has a chance.”

  In the dim, pre-dawn light, Bill could see Sally’s frown as she agreed with the assessment.

  They lashed the life jackets to their bug-out bags, and each grabbed a paddle and a kayak, taking time to close the shed door and at least put the busted padlock back in its place.

  The trip down the hillside to the water was nowhere near as quiet as they’d hoped.

  They had found a slight trail to follow, but it was obviously just for foot access down to the water, never intended for hauling boats up and down.

  Every time one of them banged a kayak against a tree or bounced part of it off the ground, the hollow thunk made them cringe and grit their teeth.

  Having a son like Cole who loved the water, Bill and Sally had learned how to load and handle kayaks pretty well. At the water’s edge, they reloaded their rucks to get the weight distribution right, and put their pistols and a few other items into the waterproof wells to keep them dry in case they dumped.

  Bill felt uncomfortable not having his pistol right at hand, but he felt it was safer to keep it dry and secure in the kayak than risk it slipping out and sinking to the bottom of the lake.