“You hear that?”
“It’s nothing. Get back to what you were saying.”
John let out a quiet sigh of relief, and continued.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of movement off to John’s right, away from the campfire.
Something was coming at him. Something big. Coming fast.
John spun around too slowly. Not enough time to get off a shot.
His attacker was of medium height with a barrel chest. Big and powerful.
The man’s hands were on John’s rifle before John could use it.
The two of them locked eyes. Four hands were on the rifle, which ran parallel between them.
John was strong, but not strong enough.
With a final grunt, the man got enough control of the rifle to pull the butt towards himself, getting the muzzle end to swing around, heading right for John.
The rifle collided with John’s skull hard enough to knock him down.
Pain flashed through John.
He reached for his handgun. His hand gripped the handle, but his attacker was fast, who kicked with precision, his shoe knocking the gun from John’s hand.
It was happening so fast, there wasn’t much time to think it all through. But John knew something didn’t make sense. What had happened to the men around the campfire? Was his attacker one of them? It didn’t seem possible. He hadn’t heard a break in their conversation. And yet, he was close enough now that they must have heard the commotion.
A hard kick to his stomach sent more pain rushing through him.
John had to act. If he lay there, taking the beating, he’d wind up dead.
But his attacker didn’t seem to want him dead. He hadn’t tried for the guns. No, he wanted this to be personal. Physical. Man to man. As if he had a vendetta.
John was ready for the next kick. Ignoring his own pain, he acted fast.
As the leg came towards his head, John shot out his arms, seizing the man’s ankle. He gripped hard, holding on tight, and pulled towards himself with all his strength. The man let out a grunt of surprise and fell backwards. He hit the ground hard, his back slamming into the earth.
John reached for his gun. But he couldn’t find it. He was just wasting time.
By the time John struggled to his feet, fighting against the pain, his attacker was on his feet too.
Where were the men who’d been around the campfire? This man with the intense eyes opposite John couldn’t have been one of them.
“I told you I’d come after you. You think you can get away with what you did?”
John didn’t know what he was talking about. He was sure he’d never seen the man before in his life. He wasn’t going to waste his energy answering him.
The man was keeping his distance. For now.
John knew he wasn’t a match for this man physically, who was simply too powerful. Each of his kicks had felt like sledgehammers.
What were his options?
John kept his ground. He didn’t have much of a chance of running away. And he wasn’t going to leave his gun there.
With his boot, John tried to feel for his gun. He didn’t want to take his eyes off his opponent even for a second. If he did, he knew that was when the attack would come.
John’s boot knocked against the gun. He felt the hardness, and he heard the gun go scuttling across the ground.
His attacker looked down at the ground. John seized the opportunity, locating the gun first with his eyes, and then reaching down for it.
The man was rushing at him, closing the distance between them fast.
John was bringing the gun up as fast as he could, trying his finger inside the trigger guard.
A punch was coming at him, the man’s arm swinging wide, his whole body going with the momentum.
The safety was on. John fumbled for it.
He got it, but not in time.
The punch collided with the side of John’s head.
It sent him reeling. He stepped backwards, trying to stay on his feet. But it was too much, and he fell to his side. His shoulder hit the ground hard.
John had kept the gun up, his arm extended. He took aim, squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession.
He hit the man in the chest with both shots. He crumpled to the ground, breathing heavily.
John lay there on the ground, his vision blurry, feeling dizzy, feeling the full brunt of the pain. He kept his gun up, finger on the trigger.
Two men appeared, stepping cautiously into view. They must have been the men who’d been sitting around the fire. They didn’t appear to be armed.
John aimed the gun at the one who was closest to him.
“Don’t take another step,” growled John.
“We didn’t…”
“Shut up and tell me who you are,” said John.
8
ART
Art’s head was still throbbing from when Sarge had gotten to him. It wasn’t the worst blow he’d been dealt. But it was in the top ten for sure.
Night had fallen.
Art had spent the day with Sarge, going over the plans. They’d poured over maps. It was the most time Art had ever spent with Sarge. And it had just confirmed his suspicions that there wasn’t anything good about the man. He was mean through and through.
“If you do this one right,” Sarge had said. “There’s going to be a lot in it for you. Don’t you forget that. And don’t think you can go running off by yourself. You know how we work. We’ll find you, and when we do, you’ll wish you were dead.”
Art wasn’t holding out much hope for a reward. He wasn’t holding out much hope for anything. He didn’t see how he could live outside the militia. Even if he managed to get off their range, what would he do? He didn’t know how to survive on his own in the wilderness. And whoever was out there now, outside the reaches of the militia, well they were probably worse than the militia themselves.
He’d heard the stories, that there were heavily armed groups out there. Where that was exactly, no one seemed to know. Knowledge had already seemed to deteriorate among the militia men. Art hadn’t, for instance, seen a map since the EMP until Sarge had shown him one.
It was probably an intentional tactic. Keep the “front line” soldiers, the grunts like Art, in the dark as much as possible. They were all disposable, and they more they knew, the harder it might be to get them to do what was needed.
And what was the point of even trying to escape? When Art had hammered in his neighbor’s skull, he’d lost himself. He’d become one of them, one of the militia members. Whether he liked it or not, he was changed forever. And he didn’t consider himself morally worthy of continuing to live.
So he’d go along with what was required of him. He’d live for a while. Eventually someone would kill him.
That was the way he thought about it. He was completely stuck.
The plan was to break into houses and gather information. Sounded simple enough.
But the house was supposedly the hangout of a small group of men and women. Word was that they were trying to organize some kind of rebellion against the militia, trying to subvert it in some way.
The militia was the law of the land.
Anyone who fought against that was as good as dead.
“Why don’t you just send in a bunch of us and we’ll wipe them out?” Art had asked Sarge.
Sarge had given him a backhanded blow on his ear for that question.
“They’re not stupid enough to put all their men there,” Sarge had said. “They’re spread out. That’s why we need information. We need some kind of roster, something that lists all their hideouts. They’re like cockroaches, springing up everywhere.”
Art thought it was strange. The militia had considerable manpower and firepower. Shouldn’t they have been able to deal with a problem like this easily enough?
Whatever. It didn’t matter. He was as good as dead. He’d do what he had to do just to avoid being tortured to death by Sarge. He knew that that was a very rea
l possibility. Hell, he’d been on the other end of it. He’d been the torturer. He’d ripped a man’s ears off on Sarge’s orders once, using his knife to dig into the flesh.
What was the point in stopping now? The only option left to him was simply shooting himself in the head.
It wasn’t a bad option, as far as they went.
But something inside him kept him away from it. As he crouched there in the shadows of the suburban trees, he gripped his handgun tighter. It was a revolver he’d taken off someone he’d killed, someone he didn’t even remember. There’d been too many of them.
Almost on a whim, as if to prove something to himself, Art suddenly brought the muzzle of the revolver to his skull, pressing it hard against a point above his ear.
His finger was on the trigger, pressing ever so slightly.
He felt like a shell of the man he was.
But he wasn’t a shell. He was a tool for those who were in power, those faceless figures who passed their orders through the harsh mouth and fists of people like Sarge.
Everything had been stripped from Art. And it hadn’t just been the EMP. Even without his old life, he could have remained himself. He could have kept his values, acted as he once would have.
But maybe he’d had no values to begin with. Maybe his life had been nothing but a farce. Maybe he’d been nothing but a cog in a system that had made no sense.
“That’s bullshit,” he muttered to himself, the pistol still at his head, his finger still on the trigger. “You’re just trying to talk yourself into it. Your life was something. You did things. You were somebody.”
So why didn’t he just do it? Why didn’t he just kill himself?
It was the simple answer.
But the reality of it was that he couldn’t.
There was something left inside him, something primal, instinctual and intense.
Slowly, Art pulled the revolver away from his head.
He’d do what Sarge wanted. He’d help the militia remain in power. He’d do his part, however small. What was the difference? None of it mattered. The world was already over. In a few years, they would have all killed each other or starved to death.
The militia was focused on power. Gaining territory through violence. There were rarely, if ever, any discussions on the essentials. Growing food was never talked about. Rebuilding any kind of infrastructure was out of the question.
The militia would collapse in on itself. It was only a matter of time.
So the way Art saw it, nothing he did mattered.
He’d become a nihilist, in a sense.
Art had been there for hours. He didn’t know the exact time. He didn’t have a watch anymore. The smartwatch he’d worn before the EMP obviously didn’t work.
No one had gone in or out of the house in that time. There was no light visible through the windows. But they could have been blocked off. Or candles could have been lit in the basement, or somewhere out of view.
Art’s stomach was rumbling with hunger. The nihilism he’d just come to terms with didn’t prevent him from feeling the physical demands of his body.
But the hunger didn’t make him realize that the simple pleasures in life were worth living for. Instead, it made him just want to get it all over with so he could head back to his “home” and maybe get something to eat, provided the guys had scrunched up something.
Hell, maybe there’d be some food in this rebel hideout.
Pistol in hand, pointed down, his arm swinging, Art moved half-crouched towards the house.
He moved as silently as he could across the yard, which was hidden in darkness from the moon by a tall pine tree.
Crouching down beneath one of the living room windows, Art held his breath and listened.
No sounds.
Hell, there was probably no one there.
He might as well just go in and have a look. Maybe he’d luck out and they’d have left their master plans on the kitchen table or something. Maybe they were out on some mission.
Maybe the whole thing was just a paranoid fantasy of Sarge’s. Could there really have been a group of rebels organized enough to have cell-like operations spread out throughout the suburbs?
Art didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to waste much time thinking about it.
His elbow cocked, his revolver pointed to the sky, Art tried the front door.
To his surprise, it wasn’t locked.
Well if there were rebels here, they weren’t very intelligent. Probably wouldn’t be much of a threat.
Art opened the door slowly, bending his elbow to lower his gun as he did so. He pointed it into the yawning darkness of the house.
Someone was running towards him in the darkness. He could hear the footsteps pounding on the floor.
It didn’t matter who it was. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see.
Art squeezed the trigger. The revolver kicked. He squeezed the trigger again. Then a third time.
A body fell to the floor with a crash.
More sounds, somewhere else in the house. Crashing footsteps. Everything was dark.
Urgent whispers from somewhere. There were people in here. A lot of them.
Art couldn’t shoot them all. He had only three rounds left. He turned on his heel. He was close to the door. He could make it out.
“Get him!”
“Don’t shoot him!”
He was halfway out the door when something hard, solid, and metal crashed into the back of his skull.
Everything went black as he fell forward through the doorway, his revolver dropping from his hand.
Art woke up with his eyes still closed. He didn’t know how much time had passed. He didn’t know where he was.
His head couldn’t have hurt more. Everything hurt. He’d been through too much. Why wasn’t he dead?
“He’s awake.”
“Get the bags on.”
The bags?
What the hell was going on?
Where was he?
He opened his mouth to speak, to ask, but nothing but a hoarse gurgling noise came out.
His eyes seemed to be stuck closed. It was a struggle to open them. His eyelids felt sticky and heavy.
A dim candle-lit room swam into his blurry field of vision.
Three figures appeared. They weren’t faces. They were just cheap plastic bags with eye and mouth holes cut out. They looked like grotesque masks, some Halloween joke gone too far.
But Halloween was a pre-EMP event. Now it was just reality.
Art opened his mouth again to speak. Just more gurgling noises.
“Just,” he finally managed to say, getting the first word out.
“You got the sock?” said one of the masked figures.
The sock? What were they talking about?
Within Art’s diminished field of vision, he saw one the figure pass a sock to another.
Art didn’t realize what the sock meant until it was swinging in an arc towards him. It must have been filled with coins or rocks. Whatever it was, it was hard. The hardness hit him in the stomach, knocking the wind right out of him.
Despite the pain, Art somehow had the presence of mind to put the pieces together. They were wearing masks and hitting him with a stuffed sock. They didn’t want him to know who they were. They didn’t want to be identified later. And they also didn’t want to leave any visible marks.
Whoever they were, they apparently didn’t want to kill him.
“Just kill me,” said Art, finally getting the words out.
“Just kill you?” A male laugh, deep and raucous.
“He wants us to kill him. Did you hear that?”
The three masked figures were all laughing now, almost in unison. The plastic bag masks had never looked more terrifying.
Out of nowhere, the sock hit him again. Harder this time. Right in the side of the shoulder, which was already injured. Pain flared. It was almost too much. Too much…
9
MAX
“You don�
��t think anyone would really be alive, do you?” whispered Mandy.
“Probably not,” said Max. “Not from the original crash, at least.”
They were approaching the plane slowly, guns ready. Mandy walked slightly behind Max.
The fuselage of the aircraft looked huge now that they were on foot and getting closer.
The middle of the aircraft was lying across the road. Aside from some intense scratches along the paint and some shattered windows, it was for the most part intact.
They were only feet away from it now. Max could have reached out and touched it. It was a strange sensation. The last time he’d been this close to a plane, he’d been heading back to the Philadelphia airport from a work conference in Seattle. He and the other passengers had been pampered, handed food and water, sitting in seats that leaned backwards. And all the while, the passengers had done nothing but grumble and complain about their discomforts.
Those discomforts were now absolutely nothing in the post-EMP world. The only times Max sat in a chair at all were when he was driving. And to be brought packaged snacks by a waitress, while hurtling through the sky at breakneck speed, well, that might never happen again. If things were as bad all over the world as they were in Pennsylvania, it might take the human race hundreds of years to get back to that point technologically.
Or maybe they’d never make it.
Max had other things to worry about.
He put his ear to the fuselage. No sounds.
“I don’t hear anything,” whispered Max.
From where they stood now, Max could see that the plane had crashed through the woods. It looked like the pilot had tried to make a landing. But why had he come in perpendicular to the road, rather than trying to land on it?
Maybe the road had been full of vehicles. Maybe there was a clearing, not visible to Max now, that the pilot had been aiming for. Or maybe something else had happened.
It didn’t matter much now.
The cockpit of the plane was nothing but charred remains. The wings had been ripped off completely.
“It doesn’t look good,” said Mandy.
“Let’s head over to the other side.”
Defending Camp: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (The EMP Book 6) Page 5
