Long Haul Home Collection (A Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller): Series Books 1-3

by Dana Fraser

  Crossing his arms over his chest, Ellis scowled. “He gets to divorce your mom with the flick of a light switch. He gets rid of his inconvenient offspring at the same time. Hell, you were on a keep safe list. We should just go to Tennessee.”

  “Divorce my mom?” Hannah warbled. “She hasn’t mentioned any problems.”

  “She’d have to notice them, first,” Ellis snarked before shooting a look at Cash.

  Hannah reached out, touching him again, the dance of her fingers light and tender. “Your dad wouldn’t do that…he wouldn’t put me on a list and keep you off. We don’t even know there was a list!”

  Ellis didn’t counter Hannah’s points. He just stared at Cash, his face was as vulnerable as a strong willed young man would allow. Cash nodded at the unspoken question. He wasn’t going to Evansville with them, but he trusted them well enough to travel with him to Dover, to allow them into the homestead. Neither of them was weak and they had skills that would come in handy.

  He still couldn’t believe the kid had hacked together a shotgun from a few plumbing pipes and made his own paper shells.

  “You go to Tennessee if that’s what you want,” Hannah scolded. “You’re wrong, but I’ve never been able to convince you before. You know you’re wrong, too, because you waited at the school. You knew we would come for you.”

  “We?” Ellis asked, his laugh bitter. “Just you, Hannah. I knew you would come.”

  He tried reaching for her, but she pulled away.

  “Please don’t die in suburbia because you think your mom is going to be there waiting for you, cookies baking in the oven.”

  Tears sprang up in the woman’s eyes. Scooping up her pack, she moved to another cluster of trees and sat down, her back to both men.

  “You think she’ll cool off?” Cash asked in a low voice.

  The kid’s shoulders bounced in a grim, soundless mirth as he answered.

  “No.”

  Ellis stared at the cans lined up where he had last seen his sister. He glanced at Cash as the older male rubbed roughly at one cheek, his mouth pressed into a straight line and his chest lifting with a slow, deep breath.

  Neither of them had heard Hannah leave the campsite.

  “That’s almost all of her food supplies,” Ellis said. “And what she was carrying for me.”

  Cash listened but said nothing. He had seen how much she packed back in the trailer, knew the total volume of what both of them had carried. Hannah had left all but two days’ worth of food, which was about the time it would take her to walk to Evansville if she didn’t run into trouble.

  The petite blonde would definitely run into trouble, especially unattended and armed with only a knife.

  Grabbing his and Ellis’s packs, Cash carried them over to the line of cans and started distributing the weight. Ellis was slow to react. When he did, he put his hand on Cash’s arm.

  “I can’t go with you.”

  “Sure you can, kid,” Cash said, shaking off Ellis’s grip to continue packing, most of the cans going into Cash’s pack.

  The kid’s hand came down harder and he placed a foot atop the few cans remaining on the ground.

  “No, I can’t. I have to go after her.”

  “I know,” Cash answered. “But you’re not going alone.”

  Looking up at the portion of night sky visible through the canopy of leaves, Cash figured Hannah had an hour’s lead on them. The moon hadn’t moved much since the last time he’d woken up and glanced at the woman’s sleeping form.

  Cracking another instant cold pack, he helped secure it to the kid’s rib. If Ellis wanted to catch up to his sister before anything happened to her, he would have to walk through the pain with less breaks and at a faster pace than Hannah’s much shorter legs would allow. Seeing the look of determination on the kid’s face, Cash knew pushing through the pain wasn’t going to be a problem.

  Reining Ellis in so they didn’t fall into a trap was a different story.

  Relieving the teen of most of his pack’s weight, Cash handed over the M&P45.

  “I’m guessing you know how to handle this,” he said even though, at seventeen, the kid wasn’t old enough to possess a handgun on his own under federal law.

  Ellis dropped the magazine, checked its load then racked the pistol’s slide, ejecting the chambered round.

  His expression full of mild shock, he paused in loading the loose round back into the chamber.

  “You’re giving me a loaded weapon…”

  “I don’t expect you’ll shoot me in the back.”

  The teen couldn’t help but smirk as he released the slide and reseated the magazine. “What about the front?”

  “You wouldn’t get a shot off, believe me.”

  Ellis gave a faint nod, his gaze serious once more.

  “I can’t believe she left.”

  Settling Grub’s sling in place, Cash took the first step away from their temporary campsite. “She knew you’d follow.”

  “Probably,” Ellis agreed, falling in behind Cash. “But she didn’t know you would.”

  Three hours on, with the sun climbing in the sky, Cash came upon his first sign of Hannah passing on the route ahead of them. Figuring she would stick to the trees whenever possible, as she and her brother had done since running out of gas, Cash had Ellis go into the trees for cover while he skated closer to the edge, looking for Hannah’s point of entry.

  “She stopped here,” Cash said, following the distinctive bubble tread of her tennis shoes to a natural blind. Toeing a small, empty tin of pork and beans, he wondered out loud. “But how long ago?”

  Ellis had taken up her trail from the other side of the blind.

  “Not too long,” he answered, his tone light for the first time since Hannah’s disappearance.

  Cash walked over and looked down to find a spot of damp earth with the shoe prints evenly spaced apart from where she had squatted. Shedding his pack, he handed Grub over to Ellis.

  “Wait here.”

  Ellis started to argue but he shot the kid down with a hard stare. “I can move a helluva lot faster without you. This is our best chance to catch up to her. And I will bring her back, even if I have to sling her over my shoulder and haul her screaming the whole way.”

  A faint smirk ghosted across the teen’s face.

  “Been thinking about that, have you?”

  Growling, Cash pivoted and followed Hannah’s trail away from her pit stop at a jog. Reaching the edge of the trees, he looked through the rifle’s scope as he swept the field. He didn’t see Hannah, but he still had her trail to follow. More importantly, he didn’t see anyone else.

  He took off at a slower trot, his gaze cycling side to side and over his shoulder between tracking her footsteps to where she had entered the cornfield between rows.

  Once he was in the field, the fall of cornsilk and leaves from a crop well past its harvest date made it harder to track Hannah’s steps. Figuring she would make a straight line for the next wooded area, he picked up his pace, ready to find her trail at the point she left the field.

  With no time to celebrate being right, he followed the little bubbles into the tree line. The burst of adrenaline from knowing he was gaining on her dampened his caution and he crashed through the undergrowth.

  An alarmed squeak had him pivoting to his right. He caught a glimpse of blond hair over the top of a backpack.

  She was running, didn’t know it was him. Or maybe she did and the absence of her brother at his side alarmed her.

  “Hannah,” he tried calling low as he chased after her.

  He didn’t dare call any louder, they were making too much noise running through the ground brush. Losing sight of her, he put all the energy he had into pumping his legs to catch up. Clearing a thick tree, he saw a heavy branch flying at him.

  Cash brought the rifle up, deflecting the blow and knocking the branch from Hannah’s grip. Acting on instinct, he pushed her up against the tree, the rifle pressed against her ches
t to bar her moving.

  She was panting, trying to talk.

  “I — didn’t — know—”

  He gave a hard push with the rifle to shut her up.

  The entire walk to find her, he hadn’t felt any anger at her leaving. It had been beyond stupid, putting herself in danger and, if she was captured, putting her brother in danger, too, because her captors would damn well interrogate her.

  He didn’t want to think about how they would have interrogated her, the things they’d do to her body while they asked their questions.

  Swallowing roughly, Hannah looked left and right then up at Cash.

  “Where is Ellis?”

  Not knowing what would come out of his mouth, Cash continued to glare.

  “Please, where is he?” Her hands moved up, their palms pressing lightly against Cash’s chest. “Please.”

  Jerking away, Cash started to retrace his steps without answering.

  It was Hannah’s turn to follow.

  Chapter Eleven

 

  The home Hannah and Ellis were so eager to return to was in a subdivision of million dollar residences, each house sitting on an acre or so of land surrounding a lake. Of the thirty plus homes Cash could see with his scope, four had burned down.

  If the original owners of any of the mini-mansions were still in possession, they weren’t out walking the dog or gardening their formerly well-manicured lawns.

  With the possessions strewn in the streets and the broken out windows, Cash suspected all the owners were gone or dead.

  The Sand home hadn’t escaped a break in. The back door had been kicked in. The garage door was up and empty, both the Mercedes and the Jeep Ellis had mentioned missing.

  Next to him, Ellis shifted in agitation. Beyond him, Hannah stared blankly at the place she had called home since she was sixteen.

  “When can we go down?” she whispered at last.

  He wanted to tell her they would not be going down, but he was certain she would pull a repeat of her last stunt or just burst forward right then and there once he spoke his mind.

  “Isn’t the light good for it now?”

  The light was good, but that didn’t mean the timing was. They had only come up on the subdivision half an hour earlier with night dominating the sky. Now they had early dawn, giving them shadows to hide in while ensuring they didn’t lumber through, knocking things down and alerting anyone hiding in the homes.

  But the time also meant that anyone they might encounter was sleeping in some hidden spot. They needed to exercise patience and let the residents — or scavengers — reveal themselves.

  “Couple of hours,” Cash answered when he heard her soft lips part with a wet pop to challenge his silence. “First we watch.”

  The hours ticked quietly by. They took turns looking through the binoculars and Cash’s scope. No one stuck their head out on the streets below. The only sign of life they saw was a few dogs and cats sniffing at upturned garbage cans.

  Thankfully, the dogs were small, puntable creatures. No Dobermans, Rottweilers or pit bulls. Still, once they caught sight of Hannah, Cash and Ellis, the dogs might start barking, the noise waking the real dangers lurking within the subdivision or at its edges.

  Cash couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t the only ones watching the houses.

  Seeing the nervous jiggle of Hannah’s foot from the corner of his eye, Cash looked to find her staring at him. She hadn’t talked to him much since he found her in the woods and he had talked to her even less. But her eyes communicated everything.

  Can we go now?

  “Fine,” he relented. “We go in single file, spread out, Hannah in the middle.”

  Neither of them thought to argue, they just shouldered their packs and then Hannah took Grub since she was the only one without a weapon and didn’t need her hands to be as free as the men’s were.

  Cash picked a route that would keep them at the back of the property lines instead of on the streets. Most of the homes had hedges high enough Hannah disappeared behind them and Cash and Ellis only had to adopt a slight crouch as they walked to avoid being seen.

  As they closed in on the siblings’ home, Cash could hear the change in Hannah’s breathing. He signaled a stop, as much as he hated pausing without full cover. He walked back to her, staring hard until she got her breathing under control and he retook the lead.

  They absolutely could not afford to enter the house with her having a panic attack.

  Parking Hannah between a tree and hedge inside her yard, he motioned for Ellis to take cover by a lawn shed. Crouching along the wall to the back of the house, he peered through windows then through the battered door that opened onto a kitchen bigger than the apartment his mother had moved him and Marie into after their father’s death.

  Cash entered, cleared the first floor then signaled Hannah and Ellis to approach. Once they were inside, he posted Ellis at the stairs and cleared the second floor before moving on to the basement.

  When he returned to the first floor, Hannah sagged onto the couch, her arms hugging Grub so tight the puppy whined.

  “Sorry,” she whispered and placed him next to her. She lifted her moist gaze to where Cash stood. “Does it look like they were here?”

  He shrugged. “It’s as picked over upstairs as it is down here.”

  “We’ll know if the safe’s empty,” Ellis said, breezing past Cash and going down the long hall to the master bedroom.

  “Safe is closed,” Cash called after him. “But they hammered the hell out of the wall around it.”

  “That’s not the safe he’s talking about,” Hannah said, grabbing the puppy and following after her brother.

  Stepping into the bedroom, she put the dog on the bed then helped Ellis push the bed off to the side. The tongue and groove flooring was a dark, hand-scraped walnut in random lengths. Starting at the wall, Hannah and Ellis removed ten consecutive planks, just enough to access the lock on a heavy steel plate and slide the safe’s door open.

  Cash felt his eyes bug out a little. “Is that a Lightning Link?”

  Grinning, Ellis pulled out the AR-15 and handed it to Cash. It wasn’t the rifle that interested him so much as the S.W.D. Auto Connector installed on it. The kit could turn any AR-15 with a true semi-auto bolt carrier group into a fully automatic rifle. There were less than a thousand Lightning Links in the country, all of them required to be listed with the National Firearms Registry and manufactured before some cut-off date in 1986 to be legal.

  Still wearing a glum expression, Hannah reached deeper into the hidden safe. Cash’s heart did a little back flip when she pulled out an M16.

  Putting a lock on his enthusiasm, he walked over to Hannah. Wordlessly, she handed up the rifle then dug inside the floor again and came up with some ammunition.

  Gaining her feet, she went to the wall safe and spun the combination lock. Curious, Cash took a step back so he could see what was inside. She opened a long, velvet covered box, her fingers caressing a row of fat diamonds before she snapped the lid shut and opened another box, this one covered in what looked like blue leather with gold leaf running up its side.

  Holding it at chest level, Hannah opened the box. Cash couldn’t see what was inside, the way she had it angled, but she walked over to Ellis and got down on her knees. He caught sight of what she was holding and scowled. When she pushed it toward Ellis, he took the case and flung it at the wall safe before coolly reaching into the floor vault and pulling out more ammunition for the automatic rifles.

  Retrieving the box, Cash examined its contents. A ribbon with a thick blue stripe at the center and thinner stripes of white and red on each size supported a bronze cross with an eagle at its center. A scroll draped from the arms of the cross to the bottom leg, “FOR” inscribed on one side and “VALOR” on the other. Cash flipped the cross over. There in the center of a wreath was Thomas Sand’s name.

  He snapped the box shut, returned it to the safe, close
d the door and reset the combination lock.

  A distinguished service cross was the second highest honor bestowed on soldiers for extreme gallantry in combat and very few officers received them. But Cash didn’t blame the kid for his reaction.

  Great men often made shitty fathers.

  “Anything else you want to carry with us?” he asked the siblings.

  Hannah stared blankly past him at the door. Cash looked over his shoulder but there was nothing for her to be looking at — just memories, maybe ghosts.

  Cash sighed. There had been no conversation about what came next. He had made the critical mistake of assuming that, having completed their little pilgrimage of futility, Hannah and Ellis would come with him. He had rationalized the detour as another way of keeping his family safe. The kid could cook up any number of perimeter traps for the homestead and Hannah could help keep the lights on.

  Ellis stood, boxes of ammo lined up on the floor. Two handguns and the two assault rifles. Unholstering the M&P45, he returned it to Cash.

  “Which of the rifles do you want?” Ellis asked.

  “You’re staying?”

  The kid looked at Hannah as she continued staring out into the hall.

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “Don’t figure you want to.”

  “Keep them both,” Cash answered, retrieving Grub. “You’re going to need all the fire power you’ve got.”

  They argued with him to stay, Hannah coming out of her fugue long enough to plead with him for a few minutes. Neither suggested he stay more than a night or two while he recharged. They showed him other stores within the home that the scavengers hadn’t found. A false wall in the pantry hid cans of food and MREs, another false wall in the back of a closet had more ammo than the three of them could have carried.

  But the stocked provisions didn’t matter and he explained to them why. The people who had broken into the home knew the wall safe was there. They had spent a lot of time and effort trying to open it. They would come back with the right tools. With as much time as the intruders had taken, Cash also figured it was a pack of scavengers and not just one or two.