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

by Dana Fraser

  The boy, Samson, was younger than the girl and softer — not his body, just his backbone. Tonya, his sister, was a hellcat. If Banker Lee had liked him some brown sugar and hadn’t be so set on courting Marie, he could have had some fun with Tonya. She had too much hate fueling her to bend, but it would be a long time before she broke.

  That was some fun to be had. The things he could do, each act a little more horrifying than the one before it, the terror cumulative, layer upon layer.

  The thought was enough to color his vision the perfect shade of red.

  Giving Tonya one last push of the foot against her throat, he moved on to the little ones — Gabby and Jace. Here, again, the sister was stronger than the brother. Maybe it was just age that made the boy weak, but Banker Lee thought he saw the same killing need in Gabby that he’d seen in his daddy and in himself at times.

  He gave the boy a light tap on the head then bent down so he could look in the girl’s eyes.

  Yep, he thought. That’s a killer gaze, like looking through a fog so dense and cold it had solidified.

  “I bet you want to kill me.”

  A foul smile shaped her small lips, the eyes radiating hate.

  He laughed, tapped her lightly on the head then moved on after one last taunt.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was the one put you in your mama’s belly.”

  Coming at last to sweet Marie, he sighed. “But I do know better, don’t I, darling?”

  Of all of them, he’d taken the most time tying her up. Her hands were bound together behind the chair, pushing her breasts forward. Her ankles were tied separately, but to the chair’s back legs so that her thighs were spread wide.

  “We haven’t exactly been intimate yet,” he elaborated, placing the sole of the fake foot flat on the chair between her spread thighs.

  Using his knee so he could cup Marie’s chin and force her gaze up, he pushed the foot closer, let the rounded front nestle right against her crotch. Keeping his knee braced against the prosthetic, he rocked the foot up and down, mesmerized by the way her face twisted, her mouth quivering and the eyes turning watery.

  “Sick fuck.”

  The muttered slur came from Tonya.

  He took a deep breath in, her continued open defiance giving him an exquisite rage boner.

  Licking his lips, he left Marie with her mother’s prosthetic toes snuggled up against her pussy and walked back to Tonya. Grabbing the back of her chair, he jerked it forward then dragged it along the floor until they were both by the cot her mother was on.

  Genevieve had been slipping in and out of consciousness since she caught the buckshot meant for Eleanor Bishop.

  Pushing the blankets down to the woman’s hips, he peeled off the shoulder bandage where the pellets had done the least damage.

  Extending his pinkie finger, he hovered over one of the entry wounds.

  “What am I?” he asked the defiant young woman.

  She glared at him, thick round lips quivering with hate.

  “Not answering doesn’t work,” he warned, lifting his pinkie and beginning a little finger dance that had him moving just over the entry holes as he sang an old rhyme his father had liked to have the same kind of fun with.

  “Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a—”

  “Please,” Marie whispered, eyes begging him to stop. “Please, can I just talk to you for a few minutes?”

  Banker Lee shook his head, his gaze burning with malevolence.

  “Now, Marie. You know it isn’t talking I want from you,” he said as he slowly pushed his finger into the wound and yanked Genevieve awake with a bone piercing scream.

  Chapter Twelve

 

  Hannah sat with Cash’s head on her lap, her back against the packs. Wedged between her hip and the side of the boat was the medical kit, its most essential supplies exhausted.

  They’d used three packages of the Insta-Clot, one at the point of entry and two at the entrance wound. Before that, though, Cash had left a lot of blood on the ground and the bottom of the boat.

  He was cold, too, and his breathing sounded wet.

  Staring at his face, she stroked his cheek, willing him to live.

  His eyes fluttered open but he didn’t speak, just stared back at her.

  “The feather,” she whispered. “It landed on my nose.”

  She hadn’t told him the result before, had felt slightly foolish and ridiculously cliché whenever she thought of it. But when the feather had touched her in the shelter, it had been like Cash placing another layer of his protection over her.

  He smiled wanly, eyes drifting shut.

  “Please don’t die.”

  There was no response, but the bloody wheeze of air through his lungs told her he was still fighting to make it home.

  The outboard motor sputtered to a stop. She inhaled, held the breath deep in her lungs as Ellis, cold wet clothes clinging to him, lifted the gas can from the bottom of the boat and unscrewed the cap.

  Listening to the soft chug-chug-chug of the tank filling, Hannah cursed the boat and its motor. She hated each in equal measure, hated how slow they were going and how much fuel was consumed even at a snail’s pace.

  They needed to go faster because Cash was dying in her arms — but he had been the first one to caution against speed. They would run out of fuel, he had warned.

  Truth was, they would probably run out of fuel anyway. And what did it matter how close they made it to his homestead if he was dead when they finally reached land?

  “Breathe, Hannah,” Ellis whispered as he re-capped the container and started the boat.

  Something warm and wet swiped against the back of her hand. The contact was followed by a soft whine.

  Grub, who had gotten bigger as they had all gotten smaller, knew the man who had saved him from death was struggling to live. His tail thumped feebly and he gave her another lick.

  She couldn’t ease the dog’s anxiety, couldn’t ease her own. Extending her thumb, she gave Grub’s ear a gentle stroke and, for the puppy, it was comfort enough.

  “Is that the last of it?” she asked as Ellis placed the gas can down without bothering to recap it.

  Her brother nodded.

  “Do we have enough?”

  She tried to keep the hysteria out of her voice. Cash, buried beneath the crushing weight of his blood loss, didn’t need her fear penetrating his unconscious mind. He would waste energy he didn’t have trying to comfort her.

  That’s the kind of man he was.

  She brushed the hair plastered against his forehead. He’d gone from cold to hot. She didn’t know if that was good or bad. Ellis thought it meant an infection was setting in.

  “I wish I’d met you before,” she said, no longer caring if Ellis could hear every last thing she said to the man in her arms.

  She placed her fingers against his lips, something she had never dared before even though the desire to do so had made her palms sweat at times.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t have noticed me,” she babbled.

  Still coaxing the motor into starting, Ellis snorted. “I think you’ve got that backwards, Sis.”

  She ignored her brother. He was seventeen, would hopefully make it to eighteen and well beyond, but he didn’t understand half as much as he thought he did.

  Not once had Cash looked at her like that on the trip. Sure, she realized half the time they were running for their lives and he was jumping through flaming hoops to keep her from dying, but there were quiet moments, too.

  In the shelter before they fell asleep and again when they had just woken. Those twilight moments when their world paused and they waited for the sun to rise or fall before they moved forward or hunkered down. The world was so quiet then, surely she would have heard his heart if it was beating as hard as hers.

  Her lips rolled and smashed together.

  His heart was barely beating at all.

  “We should have done first aid bef
ore moving him.”

  Ellis didn’t take the bait. He’d already hashed out the argument with her. Cash had insisted they get in the boat and out of the inlet first, warning that one unanswered radio check would have had the road and maybe the lake teeming with more soldiers. They had desperately needed all the head start they could get.

  Even when he had finally allowed Hannah to begin first aid, Cash had been more concerned with making sure she and Ellis had the landmarks for getting to his homestead memorized.

  It was more than simply the fact that his mother was a former emergency room nurse and the homestead had more supplies. Hannah was certain he didn’t expect to make it to the homestead alive.

  Once again, he was thinking of saving her and her brother.

  Tears ran down Hannah’s cheeks. She wanted to kiss him while there was still some warmth to his flesh, before death robbed him of that. But she couldn’t move with him in her arms and the attempt would only risk further damage to Cash’s body.

  She briefly touched her lips then pressed her fingertips to his mouth once more, her soft voice admonishing ears that had turned deaf.

  “Why did you have to be a hero?”

  Wind blew in from the north, bringing with it snow. Wriggling out of her jacket, Hannah placed it over Cash’s torso and the Mylar blankets already covering him.

  A bitter laugh bubbled up from her hollow chest. Even nature hated them, it seemed.

  Yet the wind was as much a gift as a curse.

  The boat was out of gas, leaving Ellis to paddle against the lake’s natural flow. The strong wind helped counter the current, but Ellis had to put everything he was into each stroke just to keep them moving south at a crawl of one or two miles an hour.

  They were so close — just not close enough.

  The landscape was wrong, too. They had passed some of the landmarks Cash had made them memorize — like the cell tower and the long white pier about a mile past the tower. But certain natural features were missing. Without those features, Hannah worried they would miss the small branch in the river with its channel.

  They had to find that channel. At its end, a little more than a kilometer due west, they’d find Cash’s family.

  “They aren’t opening the dam gates,” Ellis said, his oars out of the water. “That’s why we can’t find anything — the water level is up. That’s why the direction of the current changed a few minutes back. The river is beginning to rush inland.”

  The oars smacked the water as he began to paddle again, his strokes furious, the boat pointing west.

  “We’ve got to make land,” he said.

  “We don’t know where,” Hannah protested.

  “Anywhere!” Ellis snapped. “He told us the roads. Don’t tell me you forgot?”

  She shook her head, she remembered them exactly. She also remembered that Cash had said the street signs were few and far between, usually only where the road left off from town.

  A screech along the side of the boat had Hannah grabbing at the craft’s aluminum lip.

  “Roots,” Ellis said, one oar thunking solidly against the water.

  Bringing both oars in, he pulled one from its cradle and used it to push the boat through the shallow water. The outboard motor dug into the ground beneath the surface, slowing them until they stopped.

  Jumping out, Ellis unhooked the motor. It remained upright, its propellers and tail buried. He started pushing the craft forward.

  Carefully freeing herself from Cash’s weight, Hannah stood and jumped out. A scream from the frigid water crawled up her throat but didn’t make it past her lips.

  Cash had warned there were houses on the channel. She couldn’t see them and he had said many would be empty this time of year. He hadn’t said which, if any, housed people who might help him.

  So no matter how much it felt like some ice giant had wrapped its frozen hand around her thighs, she couldn’t risk the attention screaming would draw.

  “Solid ground,” she whispered a minute later as her feet no longer moved through water.

  Was Ellis right? Were they only about a mile by land to Cash’s home? Was there still time to save him?

  With a grunt, Ellis pushed hard against the boat, forcing it aground.

  “We have to tie it off so the two of you don’t float away.”

  She stopped, stared blankly at him.

  “Someone needs to make it to the homestead and someone needs to stay and keep him warm. If he wakes up, he’s not going to want my ugly mug close enough for him to kiss.”

  Ellis was right, of course — but how would Cash’s family react to a strange male pounding on their door?

  “No time for a debate,” he said, accurately reading her face in the moonlight.

  Gesturing at a small tree near Hannah, he threw her the rope and gave another hard push to bring the boat further up on land.

  She caught the rope, wrapped it around the trunk, her hands numb from the wind and snow.

  “Here, let—”

  Ellis didn’t finish making the offer. His feet went out from under him, the back of his skull hitting hard against the boat’s lip.

  His face went slack and the scream Hannah had held in finally escaped.

  Chapter Thirteen

  <(Don’t Fear) the Reaper>

  A loud crack woke Banker Lee Petty. Asleep on a second cot he’d brought into the living room, he slitted his gaze and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. His body braced for an attack in case one of his prisoners had slipped free and was the cause of the sharp sound.

  He didn’t expect it would be Tonya to escape. She would at least have tried to smash his head in already. And then there was the matter of how he’d swapped out the rope binding her arms and legs with barbed wire.

  Bitch couldn’t so much as sneeze without bleeding the way he had her trussed up.

  But either of the smaller children might be loose and trying to free one of the adults.

  He rolled onto his side as if still deep in sleep. The eye closest to the mattress remained slitted, the top one fully shut as he counted his little sheep.

  There was legless Eleanor in her Queen Anne chair next to Genevieve’s cot. Genevieve, of course — no way that woman was getting out of bed even if he decided to untie her. Marie, Jace and the little demon Gabrielle, Samson with the soft noggin and Tonya.

  All present and accounted for, but only Genevieve was asleep despite the late hour. The rest held themselves stiff and alert, even Jace, who had cried himself into a deep slumber after what Banker Lee had done to Genevieve Anders.

  Something — that crack of noise that had drawn him from his pleasurable dreams — had them awake and on edge.

  Sitting up, he slid his feet into his boots and saw them all stiffen.

  Reaching alongside him, he grabbed the shotgun that had been his bedmate since reaching the homestead. He was getting sick of having nothing but iron keep him company. It was time to put more pressure on Marie.

  “What’s got ya’ll sitting like someone shoved a raccoon up yer butts?” he asked, checking the load on the shotgun.

  No one said anything. He pointed the barrel of his weapon at Jace.

  “Boy, you better tell me why you’re sitting all straight and stiff.”

  “There was a noise,” the five-year-old whimpered.

  Even with nothing but moonlight filling the room, he could see Gabby cut an evil side glare at her baby brother for talking with the enemy.

  He sighed. First he had to get rid of the bobbleheads, then the girl. He’d keep the old lady around because she knew her shit when it came to fixing people up. And he’d keep the boy for a little while at least to keep Marie under control. But that ice demon had to go as soon as he had Marie properly trained.

  Standing up, he put his jacket on and grabbed the noose he’d fashioned a few days before.

  Samson’s necktie, he liked to call it. The rope kept Samson from running when he took the teen out to carry in fresh firewood.
>
  Banker placed the noose around Samson’s neck and untied his feet, but left his hands bound for the moment.

  Before leaving, Banker Lee wanted to talk to his sweet Marie. Stopping in front of her, he rubbed his face along hers as he spoke.

  “I had one of them light bulb moment’s while I was sleeping, baby,” he cooed. “First, me and charcoal here are going to check the perimeter, make sure my lady is safe.”

  Drawing her muscles too tightly, Marie began to shake from the extended contact.

  “When we get back,” Banker Lee taunted, “he’s gonna unzip his pants and you WILL take that black snake into your mouth. You’re gonna show me how good you can suck and lick and swallow or I’m gonna put a bullet through the back of his nappy head.”

  He let his disgusting words sink in then chuckled.

  “If I have to kill him, then we get to start over.”

  His head tilted in the direction of her children.

  With her stomach already churning from his first sick suggestion, vomit erupted into Marie’s mouth, the full volume of her disgust spilling onto her lap.

  “Tsk tsk, that’s just the thing I’m talking about,” he warned. “You gotta learn to control your instincts. Puking, gagging — biting.”

  His tongue, a small chunk missing from his encounter with Marie in the woods, touched briefly against his top lip.

  Standing, Banker Lee turned on a light then went back to where Marie had dirtied herself. Reaching past the puke, he untied her ankles, then unfastened her jeans and worked at tugging the fabric off.

  Seeing that she was squeezing her thighs to stop him, he stood, walked over to Eleanor and backhanded the woman.

  “No, no,” Marie called. “Please…”

  A fresh sob tore from her raw throat. Banker Lee returned and finished pulling the jeans off. With a grunt, he dragged her chair and rotated it so she was the room’s centerpiece, her family and the bobbleheads facing her.