When The Grid Went Down

by Nick Randall

  The man with the goatee suddenly realized how vulnerable he was, as he saw Randall taking aim at him.

  The only option he had for cover was to edge around the side of the tree, exposing himself to Thomas.

  “A little help!” he shouted to his companion while he tried to make himself as narrow as he could.

  The blonde leaned around his tree to look for Randall. Thomas fired a quick shot at him, forcing him back into hiding.

  Black goatee thought he had a break for a moment, with Thomas distracted, to make a run for it. As soon as he was in the open, Randall fired three rounds after him, none of which landed, but they kept the guy moving.

  The blonde, seeing his leader dead on the ground and his buddy fleeing unloaded half of his magazine at Thomas’s tree, doing nothing but scattering splinters, then took aim at Randall’s tree, ready to fire if he saw anything move.

  Randall saw Thomas signal him to hold tight, so he did.

  The blonde fired one more burst of rounds towards Thomas then turned tail and sprinted off. The brothers considered firing after him, but he was moving too fast through the woods to allow for an accurate shot.

  “Cover me,” Thomas said, as the sound of footsteps faded away.

  Randall stood up behind his tree, keeping his rifle aimed towards the direction the two men had run off in, while Thomas went to the pile of gear to grab his weapons and kit.

  Once he was set, he found a tree where he could watch downrange, and Randall recovered his own gear, plus the shotgun he’d knocked out of the blonde’s hand.

  He next went to check the man on the ground, approaching carefully, pistol aimed and ready at the first sign of threat. When he got close, though, he could see that the man was done for. His face was slack and his eyes were open, staring unfocused at nothing.

  The man had been armed with an AR-15 with a collapsible stock, vertical handgrip, and a scope. He also carried a Smith & Wesson Model 686 that looked both very well cared for and well used. The leather holster attested to years of daily carry around the woods.

  Randall put the pistol and all of the extra ammunition for the M-4 into his ruck, and slipped the carbine through one of the larger loops on the outside of the bag meant for holstering rifles.

  He also relieved the dead man of his big hunting knife and SOG multi-tool. A quick check of the pockets turned up nothing at all.

  None of the men were carrying backpacks. He remembered seeing canteens, but no other provisions on the men. This suggested to Randall that they were on a short range patrol around the area, probably just for the day.

  That meant that they were close to the men’s home, possibly close enough that the gunshots of the recent fight might have been heard.

  “Let’s move,” he told Thomas. “Cover as much ground as we can without kicking up a trail a blind man could follow.”

  Thomas picked up the shotgun that the man with the black goatee had abandoned, and agreed.

  The two brothers knew they needed to get far away and fast, so they tightened their belts and made the most of the daylight they had left.

  Chapter Four

  The Compound

  The ice cold gray eyes of Lewis Butler gazed out the window of his office over the Compound, standing up straight with his massive hands behind his back.

  Butler was six foot three and forty seven years old. He was an intimidating figure, and though built on a rather lean frame, he was still strong and muscular. He had been in many brawls in his lifetime, and he couldn’t remember the last one he had lost.

  A two-tone SIG Sauer P220R pistol in .45 ACP rested on his desk.

  “Everything you have told me is the truth?” asked Butler.

  “Everything, Lewis. Gerald had us follow them for a while, until they stopped to shoot a deer. That’s when we moved in on them,” Jacob, the man with the black goatee, said.

  “You managed to surprise them, and they still killed Gerald and scared you two off?” Butler asked.

  “We were looking over their gear, and one of them had a holdout gun. Shot Gerald dead right there, just about got me. The other one got the jump on Billy and wrestled him down.”

  “So an unarmed man tackled you and took your shotgun away?” Butler asked Billy, the blonde man.

  Billy wasn’t happy to have Butler’s attention now full on him. The man looked calm on the outside, but had just found out one of his three sons was dead.

  Billy couldn’t keep his eyes off of the SIG .45 on Butler’s desk.

  “I wouldn’t waste a bullet on you,” Butler said, noticing Billy’s glance. “Now tell me again how this went down?”

  Billy retold the account that Jacob had just given. Gerald was leading a small patrol along the west side of the Compound’s territory when they noticed two hunters moving through. Backpacks, firearms, moving like seasoned hunters.

  There was a deliberation between the three men, whether to just shoot them from a distance, or go in for the capture. They looked well enough prepared that Gerald decided to capture them and see where they were from and where they were going.

  They followed outside of earshot until the two men had stopped to shoot a deer. Sneaking up behind them, Gerald told the intruders to drop their weapons, ammunition, and rucks.

  When he sent Billy and Jacob to pick up their gear, one of them pulled a concealed pistol out, shot Gerald, shot at Jacob, while the other took advantage of the distraction to disarm Billy.

  “They were good, tight with each other. Might be ex-military,” Billy said. Jacob nodded in agreement.

  “We’ve practiced this scenario before, haven’t we?” Butler asked.

  It was clearly rhetorical, so neither man answered.

  “One of you should have covered each of them, while the third man went in to check for hidden weapons and restrain them. You had them outnumbered. You had enough hands and eyes to disable them. But when they dropped their shiny gear, you all thought you were kids at Christmas going for the presents under the tree, didn’t you?” continued Butler.

  Neither Billy nor Jacob spoke. Butler walked to the window of his office and looked out on the Compound again.

  He had spent years planning its development and construction, finding what he thought were the right kind of people to populate it.

  It was supposed to be a completely self-sufficient island of stability when (not “if”, but “when”) the world outside tumbled into chaos from some cause or another.

  It was the realization of a grand vision. The whole compound was walled off and defensible. They had dug deep wells, cultivated crops and livestock, warehoused food, clean water, medicines, and ammunition.

  Every citizen, in addition to needing to buy into the Compound and either pay for or build their own home, needed to have a gun and know how to use it.

  They had spent years collecting running vehicles from the days before electronic fuel injection and other computerized controls – vehicles that would be immune to an EMP.

  From his office, the entire Compound certainly looked like an island of safety and industry in a world that had collapsed around itself.

  The root of the problem had come in when the population grew to more than a hundred people. The first citizens of the Compound had been hand-picked by Butler himself.

  That was the tipping point that gave them enough resources and manpower to start the serious construction. As he had to focus more and more on the management and logistics of it, citizenship was no longer dependent on the direct approval by Butler, but by a system where at least three other citizens needed to vouch for you.

  It was a good system in theory, but it steadily diluted the quality of the new citizens, to the point where he was standing in his office with two screw ups like Billy and Jacob, and one of his sons was dead.

  Gerald had always been one of the kindest people Butler had known, and he didn’t feel that way just because he was his father. Everybody that had ever met Gerald seemed to be made better for it.

  B
utler had always found himself trying to temper his son’s good nature, knowing it was a cruel world that would take any advantage it could get. The boy at least grew up sensible, smart enough to look out for himself and not get used.

  But at the end, that kindness might have been his undoing. Butler’s other two sons wouldn’t have tried to engage two intruders that looked like they had proper survival skills. They would have taken them out from safety and gathered intelligence from the bodies.

  Gerald was too good of a man to be that ruthless, and the two intruders killed him for that. They were not going to get away with it. Nobody blacked Butler’s eye and walked away.

  “You two,” he said to Billy and Jacob. “You go tell Paul that you’re on every crap detail he’s got until the wifi starts working again. And send Gale and George in.”

  Billy and Jacob wasted no time getting out of Butler’s office before he changed his mind about whether they were worth a bullet or not.

  Less than a minute later, Butler’s other two sons Gale and George walked in.

  “You guys heard, right?” Butler asked.

  “We heard,” Gale responded.

  The three men stood in silence for a moment, neither quite ready to admit out loud to anybody else that Gerald was gone.

  “I want the two that did this. I want to deal with them, up close and personal, you understand? We’re going to find out who they are and we’re going to kill them, along with anybody else who they’re with.”

  “We want to help, dad.”

  “I know you guys do, and you’re going to go get them for me. Gale, I want you to rev up a couple of the Blazers, get yourself ten men that you can rely on to not screw anything up, and go find them. Bring them to me.”

  “I know the ten I need.”

  “Good. Find out where it happened, start tracking from there. And bring a couple extra guys and a truck with you to make sure Gerald gets home so we can bury him proper.” Butler’s voice broke right then.

  Gale had to take a second before he could speak himself.

  Finally, he said, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll make sure we do right by Gerald.”

  “I’m going too,” George spoke up.

  “No, you stay here,” said Butler. “Gale will take care of this one.”

  “Come on!” George rose his voice. “Gerald was my brother too! I want to see these bastards dead all the same as you two do!”

  “I won’t risk the lives of both of my remaining sons!” Butler raised his voice even louder and that was the end of it. “Gale goes and you stay, and that’s that!”

  George lowered his head in submission and Gale patted him on the shoulder. As the youngest son in the Butler family by several years, he had always felt that his father had relegated the toughest of tasks and assignments to Gale and Gerald. His time to prove himself would have to wait.

  * * *

  An hour later, Gale had to admit that the two intruders had good field craft. He was sure they must have rushed away from the site of the shootout, but they hadn’t left a big trail.

  Billy and Jacob had been able to describe the route the intruders had been taking, so it was likely they’d continue on in the same direction. Gale had his men, the best hunters in the Compound among them, fan out to look for signs of their passing.

  After a half hour of intensive searching it looked like they were heading roughly north by northeast, following the contour of the land.

  They probably intended to keep to the valley until they came to its end or some other landmark.

  Gale couldn’t immediately recall any other prepper communities up that way, but just about everybody that lived in the area was in the movement to some degree.

  He knew that a lot of city dwelling families had designated their properties as the place for their families to gather when it hit the fan. It was likely that the two who’d killed Gerald were preppers going overland to one such homestead.

  Gale unfolded a map across the hood of his 1983 Chevrolet Blazer. The Blazer was old enough that it was still running even after the EMP.

  That was one of the conditions that Butler had set for the Compound, to have a fleet of older vehicles in good condition that would still be running in the event of an electromagnetic pulse attack or solar flare.

  The map was an old Gazetteer topographical map of the area, marked up to show different homesteads in the area.

  Each one was flagged as to whether it was occupied or not. A couple hunters gathered around Gale and they tried to figure out how far the intruders would have gotten on foot in the couple hours since the shootout.

  Their best guess put the brothers close to three different homes in the valley. One of them was occupied by an extended family that was on good terms with the Compound. The other two were empty so far.

  “We’re about three hours from sunset right now. If I were them, and I came upon an abandoned home, I’d hole up there for the night,” said Gale.

  There were nods of agreement all the way around. If these guys had been on the move for three weeks, shelter and the possibility of scavenging supplies would be hard to pass up.

  “Steve, you take your guys over to his homestead here. I’ll take mine here. Dismount on the road a mile back, and put surveillance on the buildings. You see them, send a guy to come get us. I’ll do the same. Come seven o’clock, pull it up and let’s meet at the Samuelson place here,” Gale pointed to the occupied homestead on the map. “Let them know the situation we’ve got, find out if they’ve seen anything. If they haven’t, they’ll probably help us search in the morning.”

  The Compound’s men mounted up in their two Chevy Blazers and drove down the gravel road deeper into the valley.

  * * *

  Randall and Thomas approached the house slowly and silently.

  They had been watching it for nearly an hour through their rifle scopes, and had yet to see any signs of life within or without.

  This kind of approach had always been their plan when they came across empty homes, but their very recent fight had them both on edge.

  When they got close enough, Randall picked up a few rocks, and threw them against the side of the house, to try and announce their presence if there was anybody inside, while still trying to obscure their exact location.

  After bouncing a dozen rocks off of the clapboard siding, Randall started walking towards the front porch with Thomas covering his approach. With each step, his heart beat harder, and he was sweating despite the cool autumn air.

  Finally, he got to the house. He tried to look through the front windows, but all of the curtains were drawn.

  “Anybody home?” he shouted, knocking on the front door. “If anybody is home, speak up and we’ll keep moving on. We don’t want trouble.”

  The brothers waited. Randall heard no sound from within the house,

  Thomas saw nothing move.

  Finally, Randall tried the door, unsurprised to find it locked. He dropped his ruck and took a lock pick set out of one of the internal pockets. Randall used to advocate this skill for two reasons.

  The first was that kicking in doors made it obvious that somebody had busted into a house.

  Considering that is was very likely they’d be pursued after the fight they were in earlier, it was in their best interest to leave as little trace as they could.

  The second reason, one nearly irrelevant in the current scenario, was that it left the door of the house undamaged should they need to come back.

  Thomas shifted his position to watch outwards from the house. The brothers had come across enough empty homes on their trek that Randall was in pretty good practice with the picks and was able to unlock the door fairly quick.

  He picked up his M1A and waited for Thomas to back up the porch stairs and take a position on the opposite side of the door. He slowly turned the knob, nodded at his brother, and threw the door open.

  Both men stepped inside quickly, one clearing the right side of the room with his rifle, the other
the left. A quick glance around made it pretty clear that nobody had been in the house for quite a while.

  It had that same “closed up” feel that the Priest Lake home had whenever they got to the property after a few weeks away. Everything in the room was in its place, electronics all unplugged, nothing on the coffee table. There was a very fine patina of dust on every horizontal surface.