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

by Dana Fraser

  “You release my daughter!” Eleanor screamed.

  “I just escaped from a fucking cartel,” Banker Lee yelled, his spit flecking against Marie’s neck. “You don’t want to get into a Mexican standoff with me.”

  “You release my daughter!” she repeated with a roar.

  “You ain’t that good a shot, old lady.”

  Her grip on the rifle tightened, her body leaning heavily on her right leg, her stance as steady as a sailor on his return to the ship after shore leave.

  “You tell that to the devil when I send your sorry ass to hell!” Eleanor growled.

  “She got a lotta fight in her,” he whispered in Marie’s ear, the shotgun’s barrel sliding along her shoulder as he sighted in on her mother.

  “Let me see if I can take her down a peg or—”

  Marie flung herself toward the barrel as he squeezed the trigger. His shot jerked to the side of where Eleanor Bishop stood.

  The shotgun blast splintered wood, punching a hole in the doorframe. Eleanor cried out and hit the ground just as the screen door crashed open, the middle-aged black woman falling onto the porch.

  Cash pushed Marie forward, his gaze darting from the two women on the porch, to the door, to the front facing windows. There was a back door, too, he knew. One or both of the two teens could be sneaking out the back or already drawing a bead on him from somewhere in the trees.

  “Everybody out,” he bellowed, pushing closer to the front of the house, the shotgun level on the two older women, the blast radius more than enough to kill both of them with the next shot.

  If the black woman wasn’t dead already. She sure was quiet enough, no groaning or bloody wheezing.

  “I said get the fuck out or you’re all dead!” he frothed. “Starting with these bitches right here!”

  The two teens emerged, first. Marie’s little boy clung to the black male while her daughter came out last, fists clenched at her sides, chin down, eyes glaring.

  Other than the little girl, everyone on the porch had their gazes locked on the black woman planted face down on the porch and motionless.

  Eleanor scooted, her legs sticking out behind her, arms pushing out, holding her torso up, her ass lifting to cover one plank at a time until she was close enough to check the injured woman’s pulse.

  Even with two long guns up on the porch, Banker Lee couldn’t take his eyes off Eleanor. The bottom half of her right leg was at an odd angle, like her fall had broken her knee or one of the pellets from the shotgun shell had actually hit.

  But she wasn’t acting like a woman with a broken bone or a blasted kneecap. It was something else. Something unnatural.

  The leg was fake, he realized, a fit of laughter overtaking him. Jerking on Marie’s hair, he shouted, his spit sliming the side of her face.

  “Damn, that’s one for the story books! Who else gets to say they shot off a woman’s fake leg? Or that the old cow was his future mother-in-law!”

  “Gaaah — noooh!” Marie screeched as hands too small for a rifle tried to pick up the weapon the dying woman had held.

  “No, Gabby!” Eleanor yelled, falling across the woman and slamming her hands down on the rifle faster than Banker Lee could think to squeeze off another shot.

  “Close call,” he barked then jabbed the barrel of the shotgun in the injured woman’s direction.

  “Unless ya’ll get aboard the Banker Lee train right now,” he threatened. “That bobblehead’s gonna bleed out.”

  Chapter Ten

 

  Hannah woke before the others. After two days of pushing their bodies hard day and night after the field fire and the presence of a helicopter in the air, they had finally stopped and made a shelter, crashing for the night.

  She looked at the two men sleeping, her body motionless to keep from disturbing them.

  Men, she thought and smiled. Ellis was a December baby, wouldn’t be eighteen for more than another month, but, even with his hand curled gently around Grub, there was no calling him a kid after he had proved otherwise on so many occasions.

  He was still a smart ass, though.

  Her fingers itched with the need to stroke just below his ear as a reminder she was still his big sister. But that would wake both dog and men and Cash and Ellis dearly needed sleep.

  Chewing at her bottom lip, she waited as long as she could then crawled out of the space and found a spot to pee. Finished, she remained outside, sitting at the edge of the shelter’s entrance with her arms wrapped around her legs to conserve warmth.

  The flap parted and Cash looked out. “You want to sleep some more, you better get back in here before you turn into an icicle.”

  Smiling at him, she crawled inside. They had fallen asleep with Ellis in the middle, but he’d rolled away to fill her spot while she answered nature’s call.

  Sliding into the hold he had left, there was just enough light coming through the edge of the shelter for her to spot a downy, copper colored flash as Cash settled back into a sleeping position. Reaching toward him, she captured the small object with her finger and held it up to an invading beam of sunlight.

  “Robin’s breast feather,” he said, his voice sliding toward sleep but his eyes still open.

  “Robin feathers are good luck.” Smiling at him, she reached out with her other hand, opened the flap on his jacket and started to put the delicate treasure inside.

  His fingers wrapped loosely around her wrist.

  “You don’t believe in good luck?” she wondered out loud.

  “Sure,” he answered and transferred the small feather to his finger. “Bad luck certainly exists. Why not good?”

  Hannah stared at him, wondering what he was going to do next. Her chest expanded as she quietly drew in a deep breath. She didn’t have a pocket on her jacket like he did. So if he was planning on bestowing the good luck on her as she had meant to do for him, there was no place to put the feather.

  Propping himself up on one elbow, Cash blew softly on the robin’s feather. It floated up as he settled back into place, his eyes shut before the good luck charm landed softly on Hannah’s nose.

  A wavy line of cabins bordered an inlet on the Cumberland River south of the dam where the body of water widened into Lake Barkley. At opposite ends of the redneck resort, two piers waded out into the inlet, one for fishing and the other for tethering the boats the owner rented out to his guests.

  Rocky Coombs, a retired engineer and Vietnam veteran, owned the place. Cash had gotten to know the man while scoping out locations for the homestead. For what the family needed, the real estate on the northern half of Lake Barkley was either too small or too expensive.

  Cash and Rocky had maintained a casual friendship since then, one wartime veteran to another even though their wars had been decades and continents apart. He hoped Rocky would lend him a boat with one of the outboards that Rocky had modified to run at a suppressed sound level of forty-five decibels while moving at just below wake speeds. The decibel level made the outboard motor only slightly more audible than the water it was sliding through. Anyone listening from a couple hundred feet away would hear nothing but background noise.

  The closer they got to the property, the less hope Cash had. Some of the other inlets they had snuck past were reduced to burnt out vacation homes. Other inlets were flooded, water filling the residences. And one inlet, the one with homes like the Evansville million dollar mansion Hannah and Ellis’s had lived in, was filled with vehicles marked as belonging to the Army Corps of Engineers. Cash knew CoE was responsible for operating the areas dams and locks, but the government didn’t put them up in mini-mansions.

  They took the long way around that inlet, making it high noon by the time they reached Rocky’s place.

  No one was about — at least no one living.

  Cash didn’t need the binoculars to know the old guy face down in the ground with gray hair gathered in a long ponytail that reached halfway down his back was Rocky. His wife Janet, more t
han a decade younger, wasn’t the kind of woman to leave her husband dead in the dirt. Cash figured that meant she was dead, too, or taken prisoner.

  “Should we move on?” Ellis asked, lips barely moving as he surveilled the scene.

  “No,” Cash answered without explanation.

  He didn’t need to explain. All three of them were running on fumes. Food was almost out, so was the ammunition. Aside from the loaded magazine Cash had kept in his pocket, the extra rounds for the Browning had been in Hannah’s backpack, which was lost to the fire. They’d picked up some ammo for the two assault rifles from the dead soldiers who had started the blaze, but they had blasted through the refreshed supply in a recent skirmish. They were down to one magazine each and the ammo for the M&P45.

  The homestead was a good thirty miles downstream. They had yet to walk as much as ten miles in two consecutive days. Whenever they made ten miles, it amounted to eight miles forward at best. The rest of the time they were moving was wasted avoiding dangers on the road or fleeing the ones they ran into.

  Thirty miles on the lake near wake speed meant he’d be hugging his sister and mother within twenty-four hours.

  Without one of Rocky’s stealth outboard motors, however, the distance might as well be three hundred instead of thirty.

  “How long?” Hannah asked.

  Turning his gaze away from the corpse of his friend, he looked at the woman. After the fire in the field, the medium length blond hair was an asymmetrical bob Cash had shaped with his K-BAR. The feminine curves she had when he first encountered brother and sister on the road were gone. She was down to muscles and bones, and her body was likely feeding on her muscles to keep going.

  Hardship hadn’t robbed Hannah of her beauty, but it had changed it so that every time Cash looked at her, he had the same dull ache as when he had realized it was Rocky face down in the dirt.

  “Near dark,” he answered, turning away.

  They moved in as twilight started fading to night, sneaking closer to the cabins in search of supplies to take with them or a meal to fill their bellies. They found Janet in one of the cabins, a laundry basket full of folded sheets and towels stained red with her blood.

  It was almost a relief to Cash to know she was dead and not “entertaining” one of the CoE pricks.

  The cupboards of the main house were well stocked, something that bothered Ellis.

  “Why didn’t they clean them out?” he asked, packing some canned salmon into his bag. “There’s at least a month of food here for the two of them. Why kill them but leave everything?”

  The question bugged Cash, too, but there was no time to waste over figuring out human behavior.

  Leaving Hannah to search for weapons and ammunition in the main house, Cash and Ellis went to the outbuilding where Rocky stored the boats after the vacationers were gone for the season. He and Ellis got the boat on a trailer then into the water as the sun was setting.

  Ellis and Grub waited in the craft while Cash went to retrieve Hannah.

  Before he made it to the main house, he heard a vehicle coming down the road.

  His shoulder twitched as he recognized the same sputtering rumble that had haunted his steps since the first encounter with the National Guard unit outside Effingham.

  The approaching vehicle was a Humvee.

  Cash hustled around to the back of the house just in time to avoid the headlights on the Humvee lighting him up. He crept inside Rocky’s home, awkwardly colliding with Hannah as she tried to sneak out.

  His hand clamped over her mouth before she could let loose a surprised yelp or scream.

  “It’s me,” he whispered, leading her to the rear door.

  “I thought there was a woman,” a masculine voice with a thick Boston accent called loudly.

  Hannah froze. Catching her frightened gaze, Cash pointed at the cabin in which they’d found Janet. A little of the fear left her eyes as she realized the man hadn’t been talking about her.

  “Should be halfway through rigor mortis,” another male responded. “If you don’t mind them cold.”

  “Fuck you, Riley!” the first man called.

  “You’ll be fucking one another’s bloody fucking corpses if you don’t start your fuel and weapons search ASAP! Clean out the kitchen cupboards, too. Bravo team said they were full.”

  Cash pegged the third man shouting orders as the vehicle commander.

  One of the two lackeys entered Rocky’s home while the other headed for the outbuilding Cash and Ellis had left minutes before. Easing around to the side of the house in a crouch, he watched the vehicle commander walk onto the pier.

  Heart knocking against the back of his sternum, he tracked the man as he strolled past the boat Ellis had been waiting in. The kid was nowhere in sight — not on first glance. Then he saw the dark bob of Ellis’s hair in the water and the pale flash of his face as he brought just the tip of his nose up for air.

  If the kid was submerged, where was Grub?

  His heart moved from knocking around to outpacing a jackhammer. One soft whine or even a tail thump from the puppy could reveal their presence.

  His finger tightened around the assault rifle’s trigger as the window above his and Hannah’s heads opened, the panes swinging outward. The soldier inside leaned forward and called to the vehicle commander.

  “Think I might have found something in the bedroom.”

  “Fuck me if you’ve ever had a single thought in your entire miserable life,” the vehicle commander yelled as he started off the pier.

  He stopped at the midpoint, right where the boat rocked idly against the boards. Kneeling down, his hand disappeared for a second and came up with the puppy.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Cash mouthed the words as he raised the M15 and sighted on the vehicle commander.

  Slow to piece together the information presented to him, the man tilted his head and lifted Ellis’s rifle out. He stared at the boat then the dog he held by the scruff of the neck. His head swiveled toward the main house, his mouth opening at the exact time as his gaze landed on Cash.

  Two shots and the vehicle commander was in the water, Ellis emerging with a fixed blade knife he jammed in the man’s jugular to make sure he was dead. Cash popped up at the same time, firing into the house as the soldier raced down the hall from the back bedroom. Cash stuccoed the wall with the man’s brains.

  One target remaining, Cash thought, spinning in the direction of the outbuilding as Ellis hauled himself up onto the pier and grabbed his rifle. Chunks of wood splintered around him and he dove back into the boat. His hand darted up and dragged Grub to him.

  “Stay,” Cash ordered Hannah then raced to the first cabin.

  Ellis popped up and let off a few rounds of suppressive fire so that Cash could quick time it to the second cabin.

  The last remaining soldier wasn’t staying still. Cash saw him cutting toward the trees behind the outbuilding. The man would either run away or circle around to the Humvee with its radio.

  Cash sprinted after the man, the woods no more than rows of shadows as a cloud passed over the moon.

  Seeing one of the shadows move, Cash fired twice in its direction. From the left came the sharp crack of a rifle as the soldier shot. Pain radiated through Cash’s shoulder and he hit the ground, firing as he went down.

  Nothing but the echo of gunfire filled the woods.

  Hannah came running up, the M&P45 drawn and sweeping the darkness in front of her. Finding Cash, she sank to her knees with a soft cry. Feet pounded behind her and she spun around, weapon raised until she saw that it was Ellis.

  “Which way?” he called.

  Groaning, Cash gestured with his right arm and the kid took off. Ten seconds later, a single shot was fired and Ellis came back carrying the dead man’s rifle and an extra magazine.

  “How bad,” he asked as Hannah examined the wound.

  She shook her head. Her hands came up covered in blood.

  “We’ve got to stop
the bleeding,” Ellis said. “I’ll get the first aid kit.”

  “No,” Cash ordered, feebly grasping at the teen. “Get me to the boat. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Chapter Eleven

 

  The amount of time it took to train a woman depended on the woman. Banker Lee knew this because he had watched his father train dozens of women. Some broke before they were ever trained.

  Daddy put the failures in the ground. Banker Lee knew about seven of those women for sure, but he suspected there were far more. Maybe now that there was no law left, he’d go to where those seven bodies were buried and see if he could find more — get a sense of the full legacy his father had bestowed upon him.

  First, he had to train Marie. When she was bent to his will, he could get rid of the bobbleheads. Maybe he could march them out to that field over near Bumpus Mills that daddy so loved, let them do the digging then add three more bodies. It would be like an archeological dig with slaves and him the Pharaoh.

  He seemed to recall something from the History Channel about the slaves being killed after their work was done so they couldn’t tell the Pharaoh’s secrets.

  That’s just what he would do!

  Grinning, he picked up the old woman’s leg and pretended to take a few swings at an imaginary baseball. He still found it hilarious that her leg wasn’t real. He’d seen her around these last few years. Not often and always with one of her two kids. He knew she had a bad leg, but he’d only been half right.

  “Half right,” he snorted and took another swing at the ball that wasn’t there.

  “Hit that one out of the park,” he said, winking at the old woman.

  She didn’t respond. Maybe it was the swollen face, maybe she was just a humorless bitch who needed another hard smack with her fake leg.

  Why you kicking ya’self, old lady? Ya oughta stop kicking ya’self!

  Restless, he walked around the living room where he had everyone tied up, even Marie. He started with the two teenagers, using the foot of the fake leg to press against their throats with enough force their black skin turned ashy.