The phones were down too.
Frank stood up. He had a nagging feeling, like a horrible scratch that wouldn’t go away. What if these men came back and brought more of them? He no longer had the element of surprise, working in his favor. If they returned, any time soon, he might not be able to defend himself.
He raced out the front door, as Ashley’s tearful voice reported about the millions of American lives lost.
Chapter 5
Lexi & Travis
They woke to a duet of their own screams, Travis reliving today’s nightmare and Lexi experiencing a new horror: a bright orange snake fluttered its mocking tongue at her, while slithering across her bare feet. She kicked and pushed away from the small serpent, driven by sleep’s disorientation and an abject fear of snakes. Travis giggled at his sister’s foolish display, his nightmare already forgotten.
“It’s not even poisonous,” he said with a chuckle.
“How the hell would you know?” she quipped, already regretting she’d said this; if anyone would know, it was her genius brother, Travis.
“There are twenty-four varieties of snakes in Florida, and only six are venomous. That is probably a salt marsh snake.” He looked at her with a wry grin. “They eat insects, so he must have thought you’d be tasty.”
“Smartass!” It was times like this when she really hated her brother. “Get your stuff together. We’re going in five minutes.”
“But ...” He looked around, as if someone was listening, and whispered, “I have to go number two.”
Lexi turned her wrist, blindly glancing at her watch—originally her mom’s—and then back to him. “Now you only have four minutes and fifty seconds ... forty-nine.” She smirked pleasurably. She knew she was being insensitive, but that little boy pissed her off.
As Travis retreated quickly into the bushes with their lone roll of TP in hand, Lexi tentatively looked for her shoes. She’d kicked them off her swollen feet after they’d settled on this place for their rest, savoring the relief. But it was only temporary. She couldn’t imagine wearing her Goth boots again. They were ridiculous things with multiple buckles that were designed to be seen in, not to be walked in. She’d only worn them once before, preferring sandals. It was all part of the look she was after, meant to cut at her father for leaving them. It was a dual-edged blade she’d meant to thrust and twist into him: the flimsy dress that accentuated her feminine curves—a reminder that he missed her growing up into an adult; and the Goth style, driven home by the boots and makeup, worn during her turbulent high school years. He hadn’t had the pleasure of experiencing that portion of her life.
“Guess you got the last laugh on that one, Daddy,” she chided herself.
A thought struck and she carefully waddled—damaged toes bent upright to avoid ground contact—over to their bags, one black boot clutched in each hand. She straddled her father’s bag and plopped down on a tuft of grass.
For the first time, she unclasped the main compartment to his pack, or what he called his bug-out bag, and pulled the opening as wide as it would go. It was a hunch and a hope, as she didn’t really know she’d find what she was looking for. But almost immediately she did: a small red canvas satchel, emblazoned with a stark white plus sign. Carefully she unzipped it and snatched up a white roll of gauze tape, a smile announcing her delight.
Her feet were an angry pink and swollen, but it was the blisters that concerned her: one on each heel, each big toe, and the top-front of each foot. Hopefully the gauze would help.
She sparingly wrapped the front halves of her feet and placed a small strap on each heel, meticulously cutting each strip with a scary-sharp folding knife sheathed on the outside of the bag.
After checking out her work and wiggling her toes for confirmation, she was startled to find her brother had crept up and was waiting behind her.
“You wore those stupid-looking shoes to mess with Dad, didn’t you?”
She ignored him and instead of answering reached into her Hello Kitty bag, which somehow had become their food storage, and pulled out a package of peppered beef jerky. After ripping it open, she took out a large piece and handed the bag to him. They both tore into their ragged morsels of meat like ravenous animals munching on a fresh kill.
This gave her some time to search for the next item she needed from his bag, the only article she knew would be there. Her fingers found a folded piece of paper beside a book. It was a printout of a Google map, with navigation on the other side of it. The map side showed two points, one in the panhandle of Florida and the other on the mid-northern Gulf side, with a jagged line connecting both points. Most of that line was their highway, I-10. The lower portion of that line snaked down a couple of unknown roads to the origination point. She suspected the point closer to them was the home of their father's friend, known to her only as Abe. The other location she didn't recognize either, but guessed that was where they had been headed to spend a few days, before the accident.
She flipped to the navigation side and saw it was from the perspective of the mystery location on the Gulf side of Florida, near the far eastern end of the panhandle, going to Abe's house. Their destination was right off the highway they were on. Best she could figure, it was less than sixty miles away. That was doable on foot. They had enough food and if they covered twenty miles per day, they should be there in three. She sure hoped that this was a good idea, and that Abe was the person who could help them. She folded up the map and slid it back into the pack where she had found it. Although she was eager to explore the rest of the contents, she was more eager to get going. They had a lot of ground to cover.
“You ready to go?” she asked, carefully slipping on each boot. They still hurt like hell, and they were impossibly tight now, but her new padding would do until they found a shoe store on the way, where she could buy replacements, along with some socks.
“I’m ready,” he said, handing back the jerky.
After some gulps of water, they were back on the highway, heading west. And almost immediately Travis hit her with a fusillade of questions: “How bad did Dad suffer?” “Why are we walking?” “Why did we leave that nice lady, Seti?” “Do you think she died?”
Lexi’s favorite question was “Is Dad in Paradise?” Oh, she wanted to answer this one and tell him no, he was probably roasting away in hell, if there was such a place. But all of these questions were trivial, and Travis, as smart as he was, should have known the answer himself. She was concerned about more important issues, like would she find some decent shoes? Or was their father’s friend Abe a bum like their father? And how in the hell would they travel the thousand-plus miles back to Tucson? She was hoping that Abe would provide the transportation, although she wasn’t sure how that would work since cars no longer seemed to function: another unanswered question.
Then, perhaps in an effort to tune him out, Lexi considered her greatest concern: radiation. She picked up what she overheard from Don and Ron’s discussion: there were two nuclear blasts, and one of them was in Jacksonville, in the direction they were headed by car. Thank God they didn’t get closer to there when it happened; they might have all been dead, rather than just her father.
A clear image of her high school project on nuclear nonproliferation popped into her head. She thought of the map she’d examined showing how the wind currents would carry the deadly radiation west to east. So, the blast east of them was not a problem. But if there was another blast somewhere west, say in Dallas, they’d be dead in weeks or months. And then of course there was the second blast, in the atmosphere. Wouldn’t that drop radiation on top of them?
She felt her skin baking just thinking about it. In response, she picked up her pace and Travis followed in sync, his one-sided questions continuing. “What about Seti? She was sick; shouldn’t we have helped her? She helped us? Don looked really scared. I’m still hungry; can I have something more to eat? Can we stop again?”
Lexi continued to block him out, thinking about Abe, the man t
hat their father was sending them to. She hoped he wasn’t like their father. This filled her with more dread. How could they trust this guy too, whose friend abandoned his kids years ago? As a friend, wouldn’t you say something?
And who abandons their children for eight years, sending only an occasional birthday card or present, and then wants to have a family vacation like they were some happy family? She was working herself up again.
Their rolla-boards skipped and skidded over the highway blacktop, already sweltering from the afternoon heat.
Then a question from Travis caught her flat-footed. “Why do you hate Dad? What did he ever do to you?”
As if Lexi had run straight into a tree, she abruptly stopped and spun around to face him directly, casting a gaze of fury meant to slap her brother harder than her hand ever could. Then she let loose with her own verbal volley. “Shut up! I’m so tired of your whimpering and crybaby attitude.” She raised her pitch in a mocking way. “I’m hungry—I’m tired—I’m—I’m—I’m.” Now she was yelling. “What about me? I’m stuck in this horrible place with a sniveling little boy, who is just about to wet his little pants. You’re always complaining and whining. And since you brought up our dearly-departed father ... let me tell you a thing or two about that bum. Our mother died of cancer and he couldn’t take it, and even though he had a little girl and a little boy, who was just a toddler, he left us. That miserable man, who cared only about himself, shipped us to Tucson on a flight, because he couldn’t be bothered to even drive us there, and dumped us like trash on our aunt and uncle.”
She paused for a moment, seething with anger at her brother, not really because of anything he had done, but because of her father; because she had been holding this anger inside for so long; because she’d never gotten the chance to tell her father this in person; and because she didn’t use the opportunity to tell him how angry she was when she had the chance while he was alive, instead of ignoring him from the back seat during the last of their time together. So, her whining brother received both barrels at once.
“I for one am glad he’s dead. I hope he rots in hell!”
She glimpsed only for a moment at Travis, like a hunter who’d fired the kill shot at the prized buck, making sure it hit. And even though she turned away from him and started to march off, she caught enough of a glimpse of him—a clear picture her guilty conscious would gnaw on endlessly—to know her words drew blood.
With each angry step separating her from her brother, left flabbergasted by her words, his image already burned fires of guilt inside her gut.
Travis just stood where he was, gut-shot, reeling, tears welling in his eyes, mouth gaping at this person who pretended to be his sister. Tears bursting like flood waters from a fall monsoon, he bawled.
Lexi was a good hundred yards from him when her pride gave in to her compassion and she stuttered to a stop. Her shoulders sagged and she felt horrible. Her brother wasn’t to blame. He was just as miserable as she was, more so because he was confused. She may have hated her father, but her brother didn’t know hate. Her brother was innocent and couldn’t hate anyone. He loved his father and looked at him entirely different than she did. Even the years of separation, with only a birthday card to look forward to—often signed by someone other than their father—didn’t sway Travis’s opinion of him. And until now, Lexi had stayed out of it, only occasionally responding to his questions of “Aren’t you excited to see Dad” with curt “no’s” or “I don’t care.”
As far as Travis knew, their father was a good man who left for the right reason, and Travis had waited for the day when he would return, even though he really never did, and now, never would.
Lexi realized she had been standing hunkered over, crying for herself; crying for the father she never knew, and never would; and crying for the pain she inflicted upon her innocent brother.
She really was “a bitch.” That’s what the popular girls had called her, first in high school, then later in college. And she knew she was that way to most people, but she didn’t need to be that way with her brother. He may have been smarter than most adults, but he was just a little boy who didn’t know any better. Her lips curled into a crooked smile and she quipped to herself, “Yeah, a little boy who already knows calculus, and will someday find the cure for cancer.”
She slowly turned around, fully intending to offer up some sort of apology to Travis. She was never very good at apologies, even when she was dead wrong, like now.
She fixed her gaze on the place where she had left Travis in a heap of emotional wreckage, all happiness eviscerated by her. But he wasn’t there.
“Not again!”
This time he was really gone.
This time, she didn’t see anyone on the highway, her eyes darting everywhere. A hundred yards or so away, she saw a small object lying in the middle of the road.
It was Travis’s cowboy hat.
Chapter 6
Frank
Frank felt as tortured as his wrecked gate, a testament to this morning’s invasion.
He had hoped a more careful examination would reveal that some part of it was salvageable. Unfortunately, it was totally destroyed. To prevent his unwanted visitors from driving right up to his home, until he could figure out what was going on and find a more permanent solution, he’d have to create a temporary barricade. He could use the small dirt road that crossed a neighbor’s property for ingress and egress; the terrorists weren’t likely to know about this.
His antique tractor was the solution. It hadn’t worked for years; its wheels were rusted in place and it wouldn’t be functional without a complete overhaul. It was his father’s and he had always intended to bring it back to some utility, but time and its lack of practicality scuttled that idea. So, it sat in back, a rusted monument to his father.
Using his truck, he dragged the antique from the back of his property and deposited it right in the middle of the broken entrance, its rusted-in-place wheels burrowing a trail the whole way. It would take an adversary several crucial minutes to move this, giving Frank time to hear and respond.
He walked one last patrol of all fifty acres and the main road, just to see if he missed something and to think through all his options. He was more careful this time, but he marched with a sense of urgency—he knew they would be back again.
He had been prepping for this moment, when the US would collapse, most of his life. Since 9/11, he’d thought a highly coordinated attack from terrorists was a possibility, albeit a remote one. He had thought a much more likely occurrence was a plasma burst or CME from the sun, which would lead to a societal and economic collapse. All his preparations were centered on this type of event.
He’d built shields of Faraday-like protection using a combo of steel bars and mesh all around his house and garage/workshop. Besides protecting his electronics and his two electronic-ignition-system vehicles, they created an almost impenetrable physical barrier against any potential invaders, whether terrorists or the run of the mill B-and-E. His solar power system had circuit and battery protection from an EMP’s surge. With his well and septic, and over a year’s worth of food set aside, he was ready for the worst the sun could throw at him.
The actual attack may have not been from the sun, but it was just as deadly, perhaps even worse. Although nukes destroyed the major cities of New York, DC, and Chicago, it was the two separate nukes exploded in the atmosphere that brought America to its knees. The EMPs from those two detonations probably fried most unshielded electronics from Canada to South America and from coast to coast. Many late-model cars, appliances, TVs, some cell phones, and pretty much everything electronic, especially where the EMP was closer, were probably damaged beyond repair. But, this would only be the start of the end.
The American grid would be down, which he confirmed with the lack of Internet and satellite service. In spite of years of warnings to Congress that serious upgrades were needed, the network of transformers that made up the electric grid was fried either
from the EMP or from the system’s overloaded capacity. The result was a cascading failure that would take years to fix, if indeed it ever could be. Its effects on the machinery of America would be systemic and result in failure of everything: power, water and sewer delivery, food production and delivery supply chains, medicine, communications, and emergency and security responses. He knew that as food stores would dry up quickly, in the next day or two, those that didn’t die from the bombs would eventually starve to death or succumb to diseases once thought no longer a problem. Chaos would reign supreme.
All these things Frank dreaded for his country, but he still prepared for them as he grew surer with each year’s passing that the systemic risks of a collapse became far greater than during the previous one. Many of his buddies, even those whom he served with, thought him paranoid. Frank knew they suffered from the same normalcy biases that most Americans did, but then evidently he did too. In spite of his warnings for them to prepare for the worst, he was also sure they would be blindsided by this event.
He suspected that the Pentagon had been blindsided as well. None of their Middle East enemies had the capabilities to launch nukes. So, that left the North Koreans, the Chinese, or the Russians. He figured one of them must have taken advantage of the situation, though any one of them would have made an odd bedfellow with the Islamists. At least, he was pretty sure of this fact: Islamic jihadists were behind this attack on the US. One man’s dying words proved this to him. For his own immediate safety, he had to figure out why they were in his home town and why they had targeted him so early.
Frank once again examined each of the bodies and what they were carrying on them. They were all dressed in the same camo-colored paramilitary outfits, and all carried brand-new AKs and lots of ammo. These of course he would add to his inventory, along with one of the trucks.
Vehicle one, a beautiful 1958 red Chevy, was only good for parts—he’d shredded the engine during his successful campaign to stop it. The second was a ’79 Chevy C/K, and it was in perfect shape except for the bullet hole in the windshield and reddish brain matter spattered all over the inside of the cab. The fact that both vehicles were older, without electronic ignition systems, wasn’t lost on him.
Bunker: Boxed Set (Books 4 and 5) Page 48
