by Hunt, James
Sunlight seeped into the open panel as James climbed onto the roof. He walked to the roof’s edge, the old warehouse giving him a bird’s eye view of the surrounding area.
James turned toward the neighborhood where they’d driven through the mob and found that most people had returned to their homes, then turned his attention toward the city.
It was an eerie sight, watching the smoke drift upward and into the blue sky, but what was more concerning was the silence. He heard no screams, no sirens, no signs of life at all. There was over a million and a half citizens in that city.
James lowered the binoculars, thinking about what his wife and son might be caught in. He started to think about the enemy who did this to their country, crippling hundreds of millions in the blink of an eye. He thought about what caused those pillars of black smoke. Bombs? Fires?
After ten minutes, James found no sign that his family was close, and he lowered the binoculars and rested his elbows on the raised perimeter wall of the roof.
He was about to head back inside when a bright streak of red broke through the smoke, cutting across the blue sky.
James’s first instinct was to sprint back to the ladder, but he forced himself to stay put and tracked the red flare to the location where it was set off. The binoculars got him close, but it wasn’t exact. The flare was just meant to give a general vicinity. But it was also a signal that meant Jake and Mary were in trouble.
Once James located a landmark nearby the source of the flare, he lowered his binoculars and then shimmied down the ladder and back inside the warehouse.
James jumped the last four rungs and landed with a heavy smack from his boot heels that caught Luis’s attention as James sprinted toward the Humvee.
“What’s wrong?” Luis asked.
“I’m going into the city.” James slipped one of the backpacks in the trunk over his shoulders and secured it tightly.
Luis watched James for a moment and then reached for the other bag, but James stopped him.
“No,” James said.
“Why the hell not?” Luis asked.
“Because I need someone here to protect and watch the Humvee. It’s the only way we’re going to make it home, and I don’t need it destroyed or stolen.” James reached for the AR-15 and loaded a magazine, then he grabbed the radios he pulled from the Faraday cage and handed one to Luis, keeping the other for himself. “The range on these are shit, but we should be able to communicate to one another when we’re within a half mile. I’ll be on channel one.”
Luis jogged to catch up to James before he made it out the door. “Why not just use the Humvee? Get in there quick and get out—”
“The roads will be too clogged, and the moment people see that I have a working vehicle, I’ll be swamped.” James stopped at the door, facing his friend. “You saw what happened back in that neighborhood.”
Luis placed his hands on his hips and nodded. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and then looked back at the Humvee before finding James’s eyes again. “You sure you want to go into that place alone? I know I’d feel better having your back out there. I think you would too.”
“I’d be able to move quicker on my own,” James said.
Unlike James, Luis had put himself through extensive training, logging countless hours at the gun range. Luis was a good man, but he wasn’t ready for what James was about to encounter. “Whatever you do, don’t leave.”
Luis spread his arms wide, his shirt already starting to get soaked with sweat. “Where else would I rather be?” He smiled. “Stay safe out there, brother.”
James opened the door, stepping out into the sunlight as he prepared himself mentally for what came next. The fact was, in order to save his family, he might have to end someone else’s life. But he wasn’t leaving without his family. No matter what.
8
With both of his gloved hands gripped firmly over the assault rifle, James moved swiftly and purposefully through the clogged city streets. But unlike during his time in the Humvee, no one stopped to chat, not with the rifle in plain view.
It was dangerous to display the rifle so blatantly, because James wasn’t sure the average police officer would be able to differentiate James from the bad guys. They would only see him as a man with a deadly weapon, moving tactically through city streets.
Every storefront window that James passed was smashed, glass littered the ground, the store’s goods strewn about the sidewalk like guts. If people weren’t sprinting up and down the street in some random direction, then they were running into the open stores, grabbing anything they could carry.
No one stopped them, not even the store owners. It had been only hours since the EMP had been detonated, and society had completely devolved.
Storefronts weren’t the only thing that was looted. Nearly every car that had been stranded on the road had its windows smashed, or their doors were open, the insides looted for whatever they could find in the glove box or the center console compartments. Footprints covered the hoods and roofs of the cars.
Like the people, the summer heat was trapped in the city, and James was soaked through to his undershirt, sweat dripping from his forehead and stinging his eyes. He swiped at it angrily but never lost his focus. He was at least another hour from the location of the flare, and while he would eventually need to stop and rehydrate, he’d push himself to the brink. Time was working against his family.
“HELP! PLEASE HELP!”
The bloodcurdling cry broke through James’s tunnel vision and he glanced left down an alleyway, pausing at the sight of a woman being knocked around and then pinned up against the wall, two men holding her arms flat, while a third had shimmied her pants and underwear down at her ankles.
The sight was so horrendous, so disturbing, so unconceivable in the bright of day, that it took James a few moments to realize what was happening. And even more concerning was the fact that James was the only person that stopped, as more and more people passed the alleyway, ignoring the woman’s screams. But James couldn’t.
Before he realized it, James was already halfway down the alley. He said nothing on his approach, and the three animals pinning the woman down were too engrossed by their own sickening pleasure that they didn’t notice him.
“Don’t go too rough on her, Sal, I want to make sure I have— GAH!”
James struck the back of the skull of the closest man to him, the force quick and powerful, the contact between rifle and bone eliciting a nasty crack before the man collapsed to his knees, and the other two turned toward James with the surprised expression of teenage boys that had been caught doing something they knew to be wrong.
“Fuck!” The man with his pants down had a mangy beard and greasy bangs stuck to his forehead. When he tried to reach for his pants and pull them up to run, James caught him in the forehead with the butt of the rifle as well, sending him down on his ass in the same dazed confusion as the first man.
The third man had already started to run down the alleyway, but James flipped the rifle around and brought the man between his crosshairs. He squeezed the trigger and something crashed into his right arm, causing the bullet to miss. James turned, surprised to find that the woman who’d been under attack was the one who’d stopped him.
“No!” Red-faced, sweating, and still trembling, she struggled to pull her pants up, both of her spaghetti straps slipping from her shoulders. “Please, no.”
James caught his breath, staring at the pair of men still in a foggy, pain-induced haze as they wallowed over the hot concrete, and lowered his weapon.
The woman walked over to the pair of attackers on the ground and swung her leg back as far as it would go and then landed a square shot to each of their groins that triggered a yelp so high-pitched that only dogs could hear it.
The woman spit on both of them and then stumbled to James’s side, staring at them with a contempt reserved for the vilest of living creatures. “Remember that! Both of you!” Her face was still red, but she ma
naged to fix her hair as she looked back to James. “Thank you.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, the gesture more ceremonial than passionate, but again James blushed.
With both rapists down for the count, James turned back for the road.
“Wait!” the woman shouted, jogging to catch up with James before he reached the front of the alley. “Let me come with you—”
“I can’t help you. I need to find my wife and son. You would only slow me down. If you have a place to stay outside of the city, then go there now.” James reached around to the side pouch of his pack with his left hand and removed a small blade that he kept as a spare. He flipped the blade around so the handle faced the woman. “Take it.”
The woman regarded the knife as if it might hurt her, but eventually she slowly curled her fingers around the black composite handle and removed it from James’s grip.
“You flash that the next time someone starts hassling you,” James said. “Be direct and aggressive with them. Most people will just turn and run. But if they don’t, then you can’t hesitate.”
The woman turned the blade over in her hand, becoming more familiar with it, staring at it with a sense of awe.
“Why did you stop me?” James asked.
The woman’s face was slack, but her eyes were wide, a rich dark-brown color. “Because you were going to kill him.”
“But they were going to rape you,” James said. “They had you pinned down—"
“And you stopped them,” the woman said. “You don’t look like a man who enjoys killing. So you should probably stay that way.” She took one last glance down the alleyway at the pair of men who were still clutching their privates on the ground and then headed west, the same direction where James had just come from.
Once the woman disappeared, more screams pulled James’s attention deeper into the city, and he aimed his rifle to the east, where he heard the distant pop of gunfire. He moved toward the danger without hesitation, but when he neared an intersection blocked with wrecked vehicles, more gunfire transformed a nearby car into Swiss cheese.
James hit the pavement, and glass from the car’s windows rained over his head and shoulders. He hadn’t realized the shooters were so close, but when the gunfire died down, James slowly glanced through the now-windowless doors and saw a masked enemy marching down the street.
James ducked back below the cover of the sedan. He needed to move, and he knew he could use the vehicles as cover.
James squat-walked to the trunk of the sedan and then hurried toward the next closest vehicle. The progress was slow until he heard shouts followed by gunfire that chased him behind a mini-van.
James cursed beneath his breath and retreated to the mini-van’s rear bumper as the voices grew louder. They were speaking a foreign language, but James couldn’t pinpoint the accent.
Outnumbered, James knew that evasion was still his best chance of survival. But when he pivoted toward the van’s bumper, he noticed something in his peripheral view.
A young boy peered through one of the van’s busted windows. With his head covered by a blanket, James could only see the bright blue of his eyes.
Immediately, James knew that his plans had changed. This was someone he couldn’t leave behind.
James jiggled the door handle, but it was jammed. If he tried to reach for the boy over the broken window, then both of them would be exposed to the gunman’s fire, which were getting closer.
“Hey!” James whispered as loud as possible without the masked terrorists picking up his voice. “If you can hear me, I’m going to count and when I reach three, I want you to climb out of the back window. But you need to be quick.”
James waited, his heart pounding in his throat as he prayed the boy heard him.
“One.” James positioned himself at the edge of the van, rifle at the ready and finger on the trigger. He would emerge from cover and then shoot as many of them as he could to distract them while giving the boy time to climb out of the van.
“Two.” At the very least James would be able to provide a distraction, giving the boy enough time to flee, even if he was shot down. And he was banking on the gunfire to scare him to sprint.
“Three.” James emerged from the back of the van, targeting the first group of three masked terrorists weaving between the cars like they were tall grass out in the plains.
None of them had their weapons up in a firing position when James emerged, and all it took was one squeeze of the trigger to bring down the first man and send the next for cover while they fired blindly in James’s vicinity, their bullets missing by a mile.
With the enemy cowering, James glanced over and saw the boy had climbed out. He scooped the boy up in one arm and sprinted down the street.
More screams preceded the echo of gunfire that chased James between the alleys of vehicles as he searched for a way out of the danger.
9
A sour taste flooded Mary’s mouth, and a throbbing ache in her lower back was accompanied by a tingling sensation in her legs. She tossed and turned for a while, lost in darkness, but when she opened her eyes, she still couldn’t see.
Mary panicked, jostling on the floor until several pairs of hands calmed her down and silhouettes were thrust into her field of vision.
“Shhh,” a voice said. “You need to be quiet.”
Mary blinked, rapidly, hoping that her eyes would adjust so she could see the features of the people hovering above her. But while she couldn’t see them, she did calm down.
“You’ve been shot,” a voice said. “Your son is—”
“Jake?” Mary lifted her head, but pain pulled her back down.
“You need to take it easy,” the voice said.
A door opened and light was cast inside, momentarily illuminating the faces above her. Two women and one man. She caught only glimpses of them. The man, the one who was speaking, looked Asian. One of the two women was Asian, and the other was black.
“Mom?”
Mary whimpered at the sound of her son’s voice, and then cried when she felt his arms wrap around her neck. “Thank God you’re all right.” He was warm, or maybe she was cold. But either way, she was thankful he was alive.
“Are you okay?” Jake asked. “I poured the powder on your back. There wasn’t an exit wound. I know that’s bad.”
Mary grimaced, and then fragments of what happened came back quickly. She remembered that she’d been shot on their way inside the building.
“Those men,” Mary said, her mouth suddenly dry. “Did they—”
“We managed to get you to the back room.” It was the Asian man speaking. “It’s a break room for building staff.”
Jake helped his mother drink from a water bottle, and then gave her a quick recap of the events that transpired after she was shot.
When she blacked out on the tile, Jake had tried to pull her himself, but she was too heavy, and with the wound, he didn’t think it was best to drag her.
Stevie, the Asian male that Mary got a quick look at when the door opened, had been stuck on the first floor when the tenants on the second floor had blocked the door to the stairs. And his pass only worked on the first two, so he ran here, grabbing Maya and Zi on the way over.
The trio was heading for the closet when Maya saw Mary get shot, and then they rushed over to help them get to cover before the gunmen finished them off.
“Thank you,” Mary said, her gratitude overwhelming. She raised a shaky hand and gently pressed it against Jake’s cheek, which he cupped with his own hand. “You did good.”
“So what do we do now?” Zi asked, her hair starting to take shape like a cloud in the darkness. “Do we just stay here?”
Jake turned to his mother, smiling. “I fired the flare from the roof, just like we’re supposed to when we got stuck.”
“You went to the roof?” Mary asked. “When?”
“It’s been at least an hour,” Stevie answered.
“How long do you think it will take before Dad
finds us?” Jake asked.
“What building are we in?” Mary asked, avoiding answering Jake’s question and hoping the boy didn’t notice.
“The TD Waterhouse building,” Maya answered. “It’s a mix of businesses and apartments. We all work in some of the shops on the first floor.”
Mary shut her eyes, trying to concentrate on how far they made it from the hospital. They walked for at least an hour, and if she’d been passed out for an hour, that would barely give James enough time to arrive at the rendezvous site to see the flare.
“Mom, how long do you think it will take before Dad comes and finds us?” Jake asked, repeating the question with urgency.
Mary knew that the flare was meant more to let the other party know that they were in danger, and while it did help narrow down the search area, it was far from being pinpoint accurate.
“Mom!” Jake screamed, his voice cracking from the strained effort. “When is Dad coming?” It was the fear that was starting to break through now, as hope burned out.
“Jake—” Mary reached for his hand, but he pulled it away, retreating to a corner of the room where he kept his back to her.
“Maybe you should just give him a minute,” Zi said.
“Right.” Mary adjusted herself on the blanket and pillow that they’d laid down as a buffer from the tile. “One of you should send another flare up. There should be more in the bag.”
“I can go,” Stevie said. “I know the building well, and I went with the boy earlier.” He walked to the corner and grabbed the flare. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
The door opened, the room once again flooding with light, allowing Mary to get a better look at Zi and Maya’s faces before they were shrouded in darkness again. She was surprised to see how young they were.
“Um, we didn’t know what to do with this.” Maya slid something across the tile, which scraped and then bumped into Mary’s hand.
It was the revolver. Mary lifted it, her hand still shaking, and then lost the grip, sending it to the ground, causing the other two women to jump.
