by Nick Randall
For Honor
A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (The EMP Grid Down Series Book 2)
Nick Randall
© 2018
Nick Randall Copyright © 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.
Disclaimer
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Part I: The Struggle For Survival
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II: The Bug Out
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part I - The Struggle For Survival
Chapter 1
With the gunfire raging outside, Josie Foster cautiously crept over to the shotgunned out window of the second story bedroom, keeping her head low and hoping for a quick glance to try and determine where the new shooters were coming from.
Whoever they were, they clearly weren’t friends of the men who up until a few seconds ago had been trying to kill them. It was good news because their attention had been temporarily diverted, but Josie knew that now was no time for slip ups. Just because whoever had suddenly arrived on the scene weren’t allies of these men she and Ben Cooper had been fighting against for their lives didn’t mean they were for them.
Keeping herself low and close to the wall, and with both hands wrapped tightly around her Smith & Wesson Shield 9mm pistol in a proper combat grip, Josie allowed her blue eyes and freckled face to quickly peek over the windowsill and into the street below their building.
In an abandoned apartment building opposite from the house she and Ben were in, she could see twin muzzle flashes coming from the bottom windows. More bullets were striking the walls around those windows. That meant the men and the new arrivals were firing across the street at each other.
Here’s our chance to get away, Josie thought to herself.
“Josie,” she heard Ben utter weakly behind her.
She turned to see that Ben’s entire left sleeve was completely soaked to the skin in blood from his gunshot wound in the upper left arm.
“Oh my…” was all Josie managed to get out as she saw Ben drop to his knees before her eyes.
Sweating profusely and with his teeth grinding hard together, Ben was clutching the wound tightly with his right hand but it was still doing preciously little to stop the rapid flow of blood.
“I lied,” Ben grimaced. “This does hurt. Quite a bit actually.”
Josie jammed her pistol in her waistband, kicked off her right boot, and yanked off the sock over her foot.
“This is going to hurt more,” she said. “But we have to do it. Move your hand.”
Slowly, Ben released his grip over his arm wound. More blood seeped out as he did so.
Did the bullet hit an artery? Josie wondered.
It had looked like a flesh wound when she had first seen that Ben had been hit. In any case, the bleeding needed to stop and it needed to stop now if Ben was to last much longer without passing out and later dying of blood loss, Josie knew.
“Okay, I’m going to need you to watch the door,” Josie ordered. “Draw your pistol. Anyone shows up, I don’t care who they are, you take them down.”
Ben turned to face the door and with his right hand drew his Walther PPK/S .380 ACP pistol that he aimed at the entrance. He cocked the hammer, just like Josie had shown him before, to put the weapon in single action mode for a shorter trigger pull. Any hostiles showed up at the doorway, and it would be easier for him to squeeze the trigger and put a bullet in their brain.
“Go for it,” he said. “I’ve got you covered.”
“Like I said, this is going to hurt,” Josie responded.
With that, she quickly raised Ben’s arm and began wrapping the sock tightly around his upper arm above the sight of the gunshot wound.
“AAAHHHH!” Ben cried out as internal pain shot throughout his entire arm and shoulder, causing him to reflexively lower his pistol from the door way.
Josie tightened up the sock further into a double knot to keep it secured.
“There,” she said. “At least that will help with the blood for now.”
The gunfire between the two parties was continuing on outside. As long as it did, Josie knew, it meant the men who had been trying to kill them were distracted. Or at least some of them…
“We have to get out of here,” Josie said, reaffixing her boot over her foot. “Now’s our chance to escape.”
“Maybe you should go without me,” Ben looked at her. “With my leg wound and now this I’ll just slow down. I can cover you.”
“Don’t say that!” she snapped. “We’re in this together and you know it! Now pick yourself up and haul ass!”
The gunfire outside abruptly stopped. Silence.
Josie froze.
Her pupils darted around the room frantically for their larger weapons. The Benelli 12 gauge semi-auto shotgun and the scoped Ruger M77 .30-06 bolt action were on the floor next to one another, but the .30-06 was empty. Both guns were maybe six feet away.
And it was right when she spotted those guns that Josie felt a dark shadow sweep itself ominously over the room. Her heart raced. It could only mean one thing.
She tilted her head up and standing uneasily in the doorway was a man dressed in camouflage, blood dripping onto the carpet from a significant gunshot wound to his abdomen. Blood was also seeping out of the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t going to last much longer.
But it wasn’t the presence of the mortally wounded man or even the pistol he held in his
wobbly hand that scared Josie. It was the look she could clearly identify in his stale, emotionless face, the same look she had seen in some of the prison gang members when they had attacked her and Roy’s homestead…the resigned and yet desperate look of a man who had accepted his deathly fate but who also wasn’t about to go out without taking somebody with him.
Josie’s hand instinctively shot for her Shield in her back and at the top of her lungs she cried out “BEN, WATCH OUT!”
Ben had already seen the man arrive at the door from the staircase before Josie. His arm was bringing up his Walther .380 just as the man was raising his own sidearm.
BANG! BANG!
The two DEAFENING gunshots went off almost simultaneously.
The man at the doorway was hit and staggered from side-to-side from a new bullet wound that opened up in his stomach.
Josie swung up her 9mm and double tapped two more shots to finish what Ben’s bullet had started. Both rounds struck the man in the sternum. He fell away from the doorway, out of Josie’s view, and she could hear him tumbling hard back down the stairs.
Her ears ringing from the close proximity gunfire, she turned back around to face Ben, and to her horror, yet more blood was flooding his jacket from a fresh bullet hole in the middle of his torso.
“I’m sorry, Josie,” was all he managed to say, sorrow and disappointment evident in the tone of his voice.
He fell face first to the floor with an echoing THUD. To Josie, it seemed like he was falling in slow motion. She flung herself over to him.
“BEN!” Josie cried, turning him over onto his back. “BEN! NO! BEN! NO!”
To her relief he was still breathing, but he was unconscious. Josie’s eyes darted everywhere. His face was deathly pale and he was soaked completely in his own perspiration and the purple-red blood that was now flowing even more freely from the gunshot wound in his torso then had been coming from his arm.
It was a miracle he was even still alive, but what the hell more was she supposed to do?!
Then Josie heard the absolute last thing she wanted or needed to hear: several more footsteps rapidly coming up the stairs.
She didn’t waste a second. She reached for the semi-automatic 12 gauge and scooped it up in both hands to take aim at the door where the man had been.
The footsteps grew louder and closer and then they stopped. She could hear heavy breathing. Whoever was there was on the other side of the doorway, just outside of her point of view.
Josie exhaled slowly and rested her finger over the trigger. No matter how many were on the opposite side of that door, she was determined to take at least two of them down before they would have any chance of getting her or Ben.
Chapter 2
“Twenty three thousand five hundred and forty, twenty three thousand five hundred and forty one, twenty three thousand five hundred and forty two…”
Ojo had been keeping track of each of his steps since he had begun following Roy, who had taken off with Alex in the Land Rover. He had simply walked down the road after the Land Rover. When he came to a ’T’ in the road, he turned left because the tracks in the dirt indicated that was where Roy had turned.
The palm of his left hand, bloodied from where he had slashed himself with a switchblade after vowing revenge against Roy for his brother Dominic’s death, was wrapped in a torn piece of old cloth that he had ripped from the shirt of a dead gang member on the ground. In his right hand, Ojo held very tightly onto the Hogue grip of his Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum revolver, stolen from the holster of a dead security guard at the prison when he had lead the escape. In addition to the six shells that were loaded in the cylinder, he also had a handful of spares in his pockets.
Close behind him were Spider and Jonah, both keeping a short distance behind Ojo but following him nonetheless. Both were annoyed by the fact that Ojo had been counting every single step he had been taking verbally, and if that wasn’t enough, he forced both of them to carry all of the food and supplies in large and heavy canvas bags as well.
Ojo could trek on for hours without needing to rest. Spider and Jonah would slow down from sore feet after an hour or two of walking along the dirt road, but Ojo would simply interrupt his counting, turn to face them and say “come on, amigos, the man who killed my brother hasn’t stopped and neither will we!” before continuing on down the road and resuming his counting again.
Spider and Jonah looked at each other. It wasn’t like they had to follow Ojo. This was his crusade and not theirs. But at the same time, Ojo had always been their leader. He had been the leader when they were in prison, he had lead the violent escape from the prison itself when the EMP had gone off, and he had commanded the gang members as a cohesive unit when they scavenged and looted the countryside afterwards.
There were twenty three gang members then, and Ojo, Spider, and Jonah represented all that remained. Spider and Jonah both knew that the attack on the Foster family homestead had been an absolute disaster, considering the Pyrrhic casualties that had been sustained in the two assaults, and so there was little reason to think that Ojo wouldn’t lead them to their deaths in the coming hours or days.
But despite that, neither Spider or Jonah dared to verbally communicate with one another to decide what to do. Ojo previously hadn’t hesitated to put a bullet in the brains of two other gang members, Pills and Jerry, when they did or said things he didn’t like. So instead, Spider just kept walking along, and Jonah kept walking with him. Ojo was their leader, and without him, they would be directionless and without purpose.
Seven hours of walking along the dirt road later, the day was slowly but steadily coming to an end. The orange sun was sinking behind the horizon and the world became significantly dimmer to signal the arrival of dusk.
It was only then that Ojo finally came to an abrupt stop on the road.
“Okay, amigos, now we can rest. Twenty nine thousand eight hundred and seventy three steps. Both of you remember that, okay? I’m gonna ask you both later so you better remember.”
Spider and Jonah were relieved. All day of walking up and down the long winding road and they had covered nearly fifteen miles, but to them, it had felt more like fifteen hundred.
Jonah crumpled to the grass beside the road to relax his legs and feet. He pulled off his boots to reveal that both feet were covered in blisters and red skin marks. The fact he wasn’t wearing socks didn’t help.
“We’ve been walkin’ all frickin’ day,” complained Spider. “And still no sign of that man, Ojo.”
“Well, he had a car, dumbass,” Ojo retorted. “Did you honestly think we would catch up so soon?”
“So you mean we gotta keep walking tomorrow?” Jonah asked dubiously.
“No, we keep walking tonight,” Ojo turned around to face them both. “One hour break.”
“One hour?!” Jonah exclaimed. “Are you mad?! What about sleep?! We need sleep!”
“Yeah, you don’t want to catch up to the man only to be half asleep, do you?” Spider chose his words carefully, trying to reason logically with Ojo.
“Fine, two hours then,” an annoyed Ojo spat onto an ant crawling along on the dirt. “Go ahead and get your precious beauty sleep. And hand me a can of black beans in the bag there. More important to be fed than rested, right amigos?”
The three ex-prison members each wolfed down a can of beans from one of the canvas bags and then sprawled out over the cool grass along the side of the road to rest. Ojo rambled on about his past life as a criminal before the EMP had gone off, sharing stories of he and Dominic when they were younger and a part of other gangs, while Spider and Jonah tried their best to ignore him to get what little badly-needed sleep they could get.
“Look, campfire, amigos!” Ojo suddenly blurted out to interrupt one of his own rambling stories that neither Spider or Jonah were paying attention to.
Spider opened his eyes to see that Ojo was pointing out into the distance.
Ojo excitedly pulled himself to his feet.
> “Look, look!” he exclaimed again, like a little kid in the toy store.
Spider tilted his head to see that in the pitch darkness there was a small, faint blaze in the distance, like an orange speck in the middle of a black wall.
“So?” Spider mumbled, his eyes only half open.
Ojo recovered his revolver from the ground and swung open the cylinder to confirm it was fully loaded.
“Let’s pay it a visit, amigos!” he said with an unnatural wide grin that revealed his several golden teeth. “On your feet! For all we know, it could be the man who killed Dominic! If it is, revenge at last! Fate is with me!”
* * *
Ojo, Spider, and Jonah peered through the thicket.
Two young men were sitting on logs around the campfire, staring into the flames as if they were locked in a captivating trance. Both looked to be around twenty five or less, and neither were conversing with the other.
Ojo’s eyed rested a two door red 1980s GMC pickup truck that was parked off to the side.
“Easy pickings,” he grinned.
“What do you want to do?” Jonah asked.
But before Jonah had even completed his sentence, Ojo had already leapt out of the brush and approached the two young men with open arms.
“Amigos!” he called out.
Both of the young men were instantly jolted out of their trance and stood up to see Ojo approaching. Spider and Jonah soon joined Ojo behind him.
“Who are you?” one of the young men asked.
The second man quickly reached into his sleeping bag bundle and withdrew a Marlin 336 .30-30 lever action rifle. He racked the lever to load a round into the chamber.
