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

by Dana Fraser

  “There’s something you gotta know,” Banker Lee said, his chest all but touching the side of Fino’s arm. “Something I haven’t told Hermes yet.”

  That piqued the smaller man’s interest. He tried to turn and found himself closer to Banker Lee than he had realized.

  In the days ahead, Banker Lee would tell himself that he could see the Mexican’s expression in the dark, see fear leech into the black orbs of Fino’s eyes. But it was dark and he couldn’t. Banker Lee could barely see the whites of Fino’s eyes as his thumbs jabbed straight into the sockets, both men falling to the ground as the Mexican struggled to get away.

  Fino let out a strangled scream. It wasn’t loud, but it sounded like a jet engine to Banker Lee. He had to get the panel door on the train car open before the engine started to pull away from the stop. He couldn’t have the soldiers return and stop the train from leaving as they investigated the scream.

  Lifting his head, he opened as much distance between his face and Fino’s as he could without pulling his thumbs out of the dying Mexican’s eye sockets. Attaining that maximum distance, Banker Lee slammed his thick skull against Fino’s face. Hearing a wet crunch, he pulled his thumbs away and repeated the battering motion over and over until all the bones underlying the Mexican’s face had caved in.

  Scooting back, his vision blurred with the other man’s blood, he found Fino’s knife. He pulled the front of Fino’s pants tight, stuck the tip of the blade in and ripped a hole before reaching in and pulling out the dead man’s genitals.

  Rotating the knife in his hand, he thought about the calling card he would leave behind, one that Hermes Garcia would recognize. Glancing down, he laughed.

  Of all the things he’d heard or already seen about corpses, how flatulence or shit or piss would escape them, he’d never heard about a stiff with a stiffy. But there it was, all hard despite everything around it being limp.

  Positioning the knife for its first cut, Banker Lee released a shrill laugh.

  “Liked that, did ya?”

  Chapter Six

 

  They had taken nine days to cover about fifty miles, Cash calculated as he refilled his water bladder. He couldn’t blame the slowdown on the kid’s mostly healed ribs or Hannah’s short, shapely legs.

  The blame belonged to the Humvees patrolling the roads. It belonged to the white FEMA buses. It belonged to the four-wheel drive trucks loaded down with gun-toting, tattooed, bearded males, their presence mixed in, even co-mingling at times, with FEMA and the military troops.

  The civilians in the trucks confused Cash the most. In the same vehicle, he had seen a skinhead with Aryan Stronghold tattoos joking around with and bumming a cigarette from a one-eyed Mexican with gang tattoos.

  Everything seemed inverted. The men who were supposed to be the good guys were working with criminals. Those criminals were crossing gang lines that had been drawn in blood. And all of this cooperation wasn’t because the national emergency had given them a higher purpose than selling drugs and murdering old ladies for their social security checks.

  They were all working together to herd the sheep to the slaughterhouse.

  Since the shootout in Evansville, Cash had witnessed people forced onto FEMA buses while everything but the clothes on their backs was loaded into a FEMA trailer. As bad as that was, those people, for whatever short amount of time, were the lucky ones.

  Others had everything taking from them on the spot.

  Everything.

  After abandoning the Jeep at the bridge, whenever they heard the rumble of another vehicle, no matter how far off, they stopped, dropped, and hid, sometimes for hours. Just the day before, a soldier had stood less than six feet from Cash, walking out to the tree line from his Humvee to take a piss.

  One yip or whine from Grub and there would have been dead bodies on the ground. Cash prayed that, when it finally happened, all the corpses would be wearing green.

  “What if we could get the jump on them?” Ellis asked, drinking the last of his water before dipping his container in the clear running creek to refill it. “One of the Humvees, I mean. Put their uniforms on—”

  Hannah interrupted with a snort. “Are we going to wait for one to go by with a really short crew member?”

  “Too high risk,” Cash said, ignoring Hannah’s point.

  She wasn’t really that short. When she was stretched out next to him at night, he figured she was about five-foot-three and a half. The minimum height requirement for women in the Army was four-foot-ten if he remembered correctly. It was an even five feet for males, so there were uniforms her size floating around somewhere.

  Ellis eyed the field visible just beyond the tree line, the corn not yet harvested and drying out. Cash knew what the kid was thinking as surely as if he was saying it out loud.

  Scorched fields had peppered the landscape throughout the week, one usually visible whenever they left the safety of the trees.

  “Breathing is high risk,” Ellis said, finally voicing his counterargument.

  He looked to his sister for support. With a guilty creep of color across her cheeks, she shook her head.

  “We’re so close to the lake now.”

  Snorting, Ellis put his water away and grabbed the dog and its sling. “We were ‘so close’ three days ago.”

  Cash looked at the field again, snapping his lower lip against his teeth in irritation. Pulling out the binoculars, he scanned the border of the trees sheltering them to its end then searched for where the next line of trees began.

  “We haven’t seen any fires set during the day,” Hannah coaxed, her palm resting on her brother’s shoulder.

  He wasn’t ready to give up. “We’ll be sitting ducks moving through that field during the day.”

  Cash was done listening. There was no good time to go through the cornfield. He shouldered his pack and rifle, then walked over to Ellis.

  “If you’re not going in, give me my dog.”

  The kid scowled, the rest of his body immobile.

  “At night, our heat signature will give us away,” Cash said, his gaze going cold. “Right now, at this hour, our body temps and emissivity levels are indistinguishable from the natural variations in the cornfield. Even if there’s a spotter nearby, they don’t have any elevation to spot from other than the drones — which have been out mostly at night. And if the Army is trying to stop the field fires—”

  “Big ‘if,’” Ellis interjected.

  “If they are,” Cash continued, “then they’ll save the drones for the night when the fires are most likely to be set. So get ready to move out or give me my damn dog.”

  Jerking away, the teen stepped from the safety of the trees and into the closest row of corn. Hannah waited for him to get about four feet in then followed, Cash waiting the same interval before he brought up the rear.

  The field was massive, especially for western Kentucky. One of the perimeter signs marked it as belonging to a global agricultural conglomerate, which explained its size.

  They moved slowly, only stepping between the rows and otherwise insuring they didn’t set the stalks to swaying enough where the waves could be seen from the road. It took fifteen minutes before Ellis, walking point, reached the halfway mark.

  When Hannah reached the same spot, she glanced over her shoulder with an approving smile.

  Her expression warped suddenly. First there was confusion, her gaze tracking upward at the same time they all heard the pop-whiz of a flare being shot.

  Terror twisted her delicate features as four more flares arced through the air, their trajectories aimed at forming the outline of a box around Cash, Hannah and Ellis.

  “Run!” Ellis yelled as the flares ignited the corn stalks around them, starting with the driest plants that had already fallen to the ground.

  Legs pumping, the teen made it out of the hot zone before the flames could block him off.

  Hannah came up against a wall of fire, Cash close behind her. Grabbing
her arm, he jerked her forward, dragging her deeper into the field as the roadside line went up in flames and their retreat toward the trees they had just walked through was cut off.

  More flares shot into the air and then gunfire erupted from the direction in which Ellis had headed. The kid dove back into the smoky field.

  “Here!” Cash screamed to Ellis as more rows of corn ignited.

  Three more flares hit the back of the field, ensuring there would be no escape into the tree line beyond. Hannah started to cough, her body flagging under the weight of her pack.

  Ellis reached them, smoke stinging his eyes so that they watered. The three of them looked through the haze and blurry vision, Hannah and Ellis fixing their gaze on Cash.

  “Water!” he yelled, jerking on Hannah’s arm. “Follow me!”

  Running, he prayed that whoever was attacking them was out of flares. He prayed they hadn’t surveilled the field as completely as he had.

  Fire crackled behind them, the flames jumping from row to row faster than any of their legs could pump. Ellis had the lead, his long, nimble frame letting him zig and zag as a clear path was suddenly filled with fire.

  Behind Cash, his hand around her wrist, Hannah let out a shriek. Glancing back, he froze for a heartbeat as he saw that her pack had caught fire, the flames licking over the waterproof nylon in search of her hair and clothes.

  He jerked her pack off as she futilely slapped at the flames then he was running again, dragging her. Heat blasted them.

  Crashing through a row of corn, Ellis tumbled into an irrigation ditch, the one Cash had been leading them toward. A last minute twist kept his rifle out of the thigh deep water and then he was in shooting position, the rifle sweeping in quick circles.

  “Cash!” Hannah screamed.

  He didn’t need to ask why the woman was screaming his name. He could smell why. Her hair had caught fire.

  Looking back, he saw the shoulder of her jacket ignite. With the ground on fire, there was nowhere to drop and roll, so he stopped, dipped low enough to scoop her up as she ran by then dove into the ditch. Ellis scrambled out of the way right before they would have landed on him.

  Rifle, rifle, rifle!

  Cash’s mind exploded with the word the second he saw that the fire on Hannah was extinguished.

  The AR-15 with its Lightning Link was in the water with them but the Browning that Hannah was carrying had fallen just outside the ditch.

  His hand shot out, reaching for the rifle. One of the attackers fired from the trees, the bullet piercing the ground less than two feet from Cash’s hand as his fingers wrapped around the Browning.

  Pushing Hannah behind him, Cash swung, gaze scanning for the shooter. He saw a shadow jump from one tree to the next. A male popped his head around a tree trunk, a rifle snug against his shoulder, his torso angled protectively behind the tree.

  Cash dropped him with a headshot.

  Behind him, on Ellis’s side, more bullets hit the ground, kicking up dirt and concrete chips from the sides of the irrigation ditch. Ellis sprayed the tree line with gunfire.

  When the shooters tried to move while Ellis slapped in a fresh magazine, Cash dropped two of them.

  The field kept burning, the smoke pushing at them from all sides, turning the air gray and dense in front of them, reducing visibility to no more than a few feet.

  “Forward,” Cash whispered. “Stay low.”

  They moved as one unit, Ellis on point, rifle sweeping back and forth at the screen of smoke. Cash held the rear, moving in a backwards angled walk as he aimed the Browning at the gray, ghostly wall. Between them, Hannah looked left and right, the waterlogged AR-15 on her shoulder and Grub shivering in her arms from the cold water he’d been pitched into when Ellis hit the ditch.

  Twenty feet from the end of the field, the smoke still heavy, Cash tapped on Ellis’s shoulder. The teen stopped. With a hand signal, Cash ordered him to take the Browning and spare magazine while he took the M16. Making the exchange, Cash motioned for Hannah and Ellis to get as low as they could while he crawled out of the ditch and disappeared into the rows of smoldering corn.

  Ellis curled a finger around the rifle’s trigger, his teeth threatening to chatter.

  Talk about running hot and cold, he thought, suppressing a nervous laugh.

  Next to him, he could feel Hannah shivering. He glanced over, the terror in her eyes cutting at him until he had to look away.

  His body jerked at the sound of two quick shots, then another pair a minute later.

  Please let that be Cash double tapping these bastards!

  Another minute passed, then several more. With nothing but silence coming from either side of the field, he heard Hannah’s small sniffle next to him.

  He looked at her, read the question in her eyes.

  Is he dead? Is Cash dead?

  Mouth forming a grim line, he tightened his grip on the rifle and started to move forward.

  Ahead of them, the smoke darkened, shadows coalescing to form the shape of a man.

  Emerging from the haze, eyes blazing, Cash jerked his head, motioning for them to follow.

  Chapter Seven

 

  A slow, steady drip played in the back of Bobby Joe Gallows mind.

  Water?

  Blood?

  His blood?

  His eyes drifted open, the space around him pitch black. He patted his pockets then the moisture rich ground around him, his hand eventually landing on a flashlight. Turning it on, he saw rugged, nature-carved walls and clusters of yellow-orange stalactites above him, their presence the product of the constant dripping that had finally roused him from sleep.

  Slowly sitting up, muscles protesting after his second night on the floor of the limestone cavern, he cast the light around, his memory for where he’d left his supplies fuzzy. The beam hit on a travel trunk, one that had reminded him of his father’s World War II foot locker when he’d come across it at the flea market in Marion three years past.

  The space too low for standing upright, he crawled over to the trunk and opened its lid. Inside were supplies, some of the contents in containers with desiccant packets to protect them from the cavern’s high humidity levels and constant drip of water.

  He had already dug around in the trunk upon his arrival, unwisely deciding to open the bottle of moonshine he had included when he hauled everything out last fall because, at some point, when the shit had truly hit the fan and the government was blowing up the homes of innocent civilians, any sane man would want to get drunk.

  Retrieving an MRE, he returned to where he could rest his back against his traveling pack. Before he started to eat, he pulled out a fist-sized LED light, turned it on and placed it next to him. Then he pulled out his shortwave receiver and his bible.

  He wasn’t looking for words of comfort in the Good Book, he was looking for friends. The blank, nearly transparent pages at the front and back of the pocket-sized edition was filled with notations in Gallows’ hand on the frequencies used by operators he respected. Many of the men on the other end of the microphone had been broadcasting illegally for years, either because of the bandwidth they occupied or because they had never bothered getting a license with the FCC.

  In the regular world, their activities were classified as a felony, but the Feds hadn’t bothered tracking most of them down in the past.

  At a time when the government seemed to be at war with its own people, however, spreading the truth was an act of treason.

  The penalty for treason was death.

  It was an odd thing, he mused, slowly twisting the dial, an antenna wire running out the opening of the cave and up a nearby tree. He had maintained the capacity to broadcast at a considerable distance for over a decade on his homestead, but had used the equipment for idle, public chatter that he wouldn’t mind the Feds listening in on. And he’d kept his conversations restrained to the bandwidth allotted to hobbyists like him.

  The silence on the receiver as he turn
ed the dial at a glacial pace was why he had kept his thoughts and the many reports he picked up private until it mattered most. These men he’d never met in person, but who were his colleagues and friends regardless, were gone — wiped out. And the government had tried to do the same thing to him. They would try again when they discovered him on the air once more.

  The day he could broadcast again was a good week off. He had to get to his second location, a leased parcel of land under a dummy corporation, the collapsing barn hiding an old news van he’d bought at auction.

  To get there, he needed to move from one cache to the next, resupplying. And he would have to continue moving, never broadcasting from the van in one place for long.

  He had to get the word out. He’d been building up to it in his last broadcast before the military had come onto his property and blown up his tower and his home.

  The plain folk like him who still survived had to know about the bunkers, had to know about how the power wasn’t really gone, just being selectively funneled.

  More than anything, they needed to know who had unleashed this hell on earth.

  Chapter Eight

 

  Prying his hand from the single sheet of paper he held in a death grip, Major Larry Fields knocked on the door of the newly promoted General Stephen Billows. Ears straining, he heard Billows bid him enter, the tone oddly contemplative.

  Images of Lieutenant Paisley before her death swam inside Fields’ head as he wrapped a shaking hand around the doorknob and twisted.

  “That’s quite a stack you’ve got there,” Billows mused after Fields shut the door and turned to face him.

  “Talking points, General,” Fields said. “I prepared Project Erebus status reports for the touch screen, as well as some updates on…”

  “My lost lambs?” Billows smiled.