Once the Jon boat was tucked away, we moved to the side of the house and got our bearings.
“Let’s take Pinetree Road,” I said, pointing to a cross street just east of our location. “We can take that to the Winter Park Racquet Club and cut through the back of its property, then up to Venetian way and we’re home.”
My dad lived in a modest area of town, his house was in an older subdivision a block from the lake. I’d been on this part of Lake Maitland on his neighbor’s boat, waterskiing and fishing the shoreline. I knew we’d be at his house within the hour.
We had moved slowly and carefully up until now, but the rising sun was pushing us to quickly finish our journey. About a half a mile up Pinetree, looking over the trees to the left, I could make out the top of the Racquet Club. The 1920’s brick two-story building sat on a small hill, towering over a sunken grotto-like pool area. The elegant building still retained its distinguished feel, even with weeks of neglect. I directed us to the left up a long driveway and through a mansion’s back yard. Pushing through hedges of Formosa azaleas and a stand of bamboo plants, we squatted next to the club’s brick knee-high wall.
“It looks abandoned,” I commented, anxious to find my dad’s house and call it a day. We were all exhausted and in need of some sleep, which pushed us to move faster than we should have. So far, the last hour had brought us luck as we had let our cautious side get overruled by our impatience.
Just as we were prepared to sprint across the yard in front of us, we heard the sound of someone yelling echoing down toward us from the elevated building. Ducking back into the brush, we held our place as loud and stressed voices grew in intensity from within the old, majestic building.
Gunshots rang out from the club, causing me to duck and Janice and Maria to drop to the dirt. Not hearing any bullets pass by, I inched out from concealment and looked up at the historic brick structure.
The gunfire could be heard coming from the front but not directed at us. The shots quickly reached a continuous crescendo of high pitched cracks and lower pitched booms as a bunch people were trying their best to end the others’ lives.
“Quick!” I said. “Let’s move to the other side. The shots are from out front.”
“Hurry!” Jorge added. “We don’t have much time.”
The five of us sprinted out of the brush and across the back of the property, keeping as close to the lake as we could. Seconds dragged as I pumped my legs, tearing across the formerly manicured back lawn. I felt like I was in mud, my feet and legs seeming to be moving far slower than normal.
Eventually, we found ourselves in the brush on the other side of the tennis club’s property and into another back yard. We stopped within the bushes and scanned the house in front of us, yet another massive mansion with a pool area the size of most people’s entire property.
“Just how much money is in this town?” I asked, shaking my head at the hundreds of millions of dollars in land and house value that surrounded us. “I just can’t figure out who makes enough money to afford these places. I mean, what do they do?”
“You mean what did they do,” Garrett corrected me. “Right now, I’ll bet any one of these people would give up all their wealth and property to find somewhere safe.”
“Let’s have this conversation later, like when we’re safe!” Jorge exhorted. “Move it!”
The gunfire still rang out as we sprinted yet again through a couple more backyards, twice having to scale fences and once having to skirt around and into the lake to make it to the next yard.
About seven or eight houses away from the club, the gunfire stopped. The yards had no more walls and the land was open, giving each of the houses an unobstructed line of sight across the lake. It may have been a pretty view, but it offered no concealment. With the sunrise just moments away, we made our way up between two of the lakefront homes and off the exposed backyards.
“Just keep going to the left,” I said, pointing down the street. “And we’ll come to a foot bridge that should take us into my dad’s neighborhood.”
“I say we just go for it,” Garrett said. “There’s no cover in the backyards now, and we can’t be more than a mile away from the house.”
Just as I was about to agree, we heard a blood curdling scream coming from our right in the direction of the Racquet club. Ducking back into the side yard of the homes we were passing between, we hid behind a large air conditioning unit and brought our rifles up to our shoulders, ready to defend ourselves.
The screams came closer, and I snuck up to the bushes that hugged the front and side of the terracotta-colored mansion to our right. Looking down the road, a young, thin kid in jeans and a t-shirt was being chased by two tattooed men. The boy, by the looks of it, had been in high school before the power went out and was running for his life. Without a weapon, he only had his legs to try and get out of his predicament, but he wasn’t fast enough. The two very rough looking men caught up with him as one of them dropped his rifle and sprinted after the boy, tackling him in the front yard of the house across the street.
Out of breath and carrying both rifles, the other man caught up to his friend as he struggled to pin the kid down. The two men laughed and spoke in Spanish, finally subduing their victim with a vicious blow to his nose, sending blood spurting out of his nostrils from the next strike to his stomach.
The kid writhed on the ground, clutching his belly with one arm, and protecting his face with the other. After a quick word amongst themselves, the sprinter flipped the kid on his stomach and began to tug on his pants. They were going to molest the poor young man!
“JORGE!” I hissed as quietly as I could. “QUICK!”
Jorge was at my side in an instant, assessing the situation. He took a brief look up the street to confirm no others were coming.
“I’ll take the one on the right,” I said as I brought the rifle up to my shoulder. Looking through the red dot sight, I put the glowing point of light between the right man’s shoulders. I was less than 50 yards away from him, and with both men’s backs to us and both concentrating on the cowardly act they were planning, I knew my aim would be true.
“Now!” I heard Jorge say.
I applied steady pressure to the trigger and felt the rifle jump back into my shoulder. The bullet tore across the space between us, travelling at nearly 3000 feet per second. It slammed into the man’s back, knocking him to the ground.
I never heard Jorge’s shot, being so focused on my target. When I looked to the left, all I could see was the other man sprawled on top of his victim, blood spurting from his neck.
We sprinted across the street, the others trailing us as we moved to get the boy out from under the dying thug’s body.
The gangbanger clutched with futility at the wound in an effort to stem the flow of his life blood as it spurted out with each beat of his heart. Jorge kicked him off the semi-conscious kid who was now face down in the grass; and lifting the boy up, we began to run down the street, away from the club. Dragging the boy at first, then helping him run after he pulled up his partially removed jeans, we made it to the walking bridge and across the small creek it spanned. The bridge, only wide enough for people and bicycles, was a perfect choke point and easily defended. We stopped and turned back after crossing over the brook, Jorge and I taking a firing position and looking back up the road where we had just come from.
“Garrett,” I said. “Take Janice and Maria up the road and wait for us. Take the kid too.”
The four of them left, leaving me and Jorge to set up a hasty ambush in case we were being followed.
After a few minutes, it was clear there weren’t going to be any followers. We quickly caught up with the others, finding them in a thicket of brush around a bend in the road.
“We’re close!” I said. “But before we go to the house, I want to find out what the he
ll went on back there!”
I approached the winded young man and gave him a look-over.
He was small, almost frail. I estimated that he wasn’t out of his teens, and if you had said he had just started high school, I wouldn’t have challenged you. He carried no weapons and was pretty beat up from the thrashing we saw.
“Hey,” I said, squatting down next to him. “You alright?”
The young man sat for the longest of times, and I wondered what was going on in his brain as we waited for an answer.
The pretty girl was talking, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. My God, they were going to rape me. My nose has to be broken and my ribs are killing me. The pain is so bad I can’t think straight.
They were so quick!
I had just woken up, sleeping on the carpet in the clubhouse, when one of the guys yelled. I couldn’t make out what he said, still half asleep and sore from all the lifting and walking the day before. The next thing I knew, bullets were ripping through the walls and two of my brothers were shredded in the first few seconds. I panicked, I didn’t know where my gun was, but it didn’t matter since I had never used it. I ran out the back door and onto the street.
We had been looting Winter Park the last week, sending our goods back to the rest of the group. We had been lucky, finding a lot of jewelry along with gold and silver coins. They told us not to waste time with paper money because it was worthless now.
Unlike the others, I never have pulled a trigger, just because I don’t like killing people. I just want to survive; and until now, I thought we were the biggest and meanest group out there, that is until the damn Spics showed up. Someone from our group said they were from Central America, but most of the guys in the gang were pretty stupid. I took everything they said with a grain of salt.
Now, the Latin gang had killed my crew, all the gold and silver were gone, and these people had saved me.
The pretty girl was still looking at me. Did she say something? I must have had a funny look on my face because she said something again.
“Are you alright?” She asked.
I looked at her and suddenly recognized her! It couldn’t be! But it was.
I thought about the last few weeks and of my white supremacist brothers; They had taken me in and I owed them my life. But while I feel a bond with them, part of me doesn’t want to go back, the looting and killing are eating away at me. I am torn. Could I start a new life with these people? They saved me, and that’s more than most would do.
She tapped me on the shoulders again and I decided to go with them. I briefly worried about the demons within me, but they have receded, lurking just beneath the surface.
Do I go with them, knowing how close to the edge my dark side lurks? Right now, I suppose I don’t have a choice.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m alright.”
The kid finally replied; the shock must have put him in a bad place.
“Can you walk?” I asked. “You can come with us if you’d like. We aren’t far from our destination.”
“Yeah, I’d like that!” The kid replied.
We moved off, me in the lead. I turned left when the road hit a dead end and we were on the last leg of our journey to my dad’s house.
As we approached his neighborhood, I felt the presence of the young man next to me. He was on my right, keeping up with me stride for stride.
As we turned down the final street, I leaned over and spoke to him.
“My name’s Charlie! What’s yours?”
“Beker,” he said. “My name’s Beker.”
Chapter 18
“… what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms… the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Hey, Gerry!” The cry came from across the yard.
Kramer was silently steaming in the early afternoon sun, not from the heat of the day, but because his lovely wife had insisted that “they” clean up the garden bed that surrounded their country home. His wife, long since departed to attend to yet another chore that he thought of as totally unnecessary, was now working in the house while he slaved away in a hedge of pittosporum plants. Chopping away at the shoots that the plant was extending upward as it sought the winter sun, Kramer was just glad he wasn’t allergic to the bush, a rather common reaction many people had when their skin contacted the plant’s pollen.
Over the years, Dr. Kramer had learned that women and men held vastly different standards. Even though as a world-class cardiologist he had long ago proven his attention to detail, it was what required that attention which caused friction in most marriages. Pruning hedges during an apocalypse just didn’t seem like a good use of his energy; but for his wife, it was a necessity. In the end, Gerry knew two things. A happy wife is a happy life; and secondly, she was usually right when it came to things other than his line of work. She wanted some normalcy, and he couldn’t deny her that. The difference between the two sexes was that most men could adapt to a new normal far better than most women.
“Gerry! Wake up, buddy! I’ve got some good news!”
Gerry Kramer, doctor turned landscaper, looked up from his pruning shears as Ed was trotting across the driveway with a huge grin on his face.
“Will and Rob took the new dune buggy out for a spin this morning,” Ed began.
“Heard it loud and clear!” Gerry replied, grinning back at his enthusiastic friend.
“It’s not that loud!” Ed replied, obviously hurt that his friend was denigrating his latest project. “It’s just darned quiet now and every noise sounds loud.”
“Come on, Ed. I’m just kidding. What’s the good news?”
“It’s not just good news,” Ed stated. “It’s great news. It’s about Claire! I told them to check on Bedford, while they were out joyriding. They just got back. Old Vernon’s gotten in touch with a guy in Nashville. He received a message from the hospital that Clair’s alright, and that they’ll try and put you two on an HF frequency tonight so you can speak with her directly!”
Kramer stood silently in front of his friend. Having compartmentalized his emotions about her safety, Kramer was blindsided by the news that his oldest daughter was alive and well.
“Well, the least you can do is show some gratitude,” Ed said, worried that his friend had gone mute.
“God, Ed. I’m floored.” He replied, finally showing a smile. “I just put it away, figuring I wouldn’t be able to find out anything for a while.”
Kramer hugged his friend. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how much you mean to Barb and me. Come on! Let’s tell her the good news.”
Barb broke down in tears after she found out that they might be able to speak with their daughter later that night. Within minutes, they had all gathered in the Kramer kitchen, only Will was left behind as a sentry out by the road where a berm of dirt had been pushed up to provide some cover for anyone manning the guard post.
It was decided that Caroline, Barb and Gerry would accompany Ed to Vernon’s hidden bunker. They would use the old Cutlass, which Rob and Ed had cleaned up and serviced.
“The Cutlass has a full tank of gas,” Ed said. “I raided the Academy’s fuel bladder and brought back a bunch of fuel in gas caddies.”
Ed had several 14-gallon Duramax plastic gas caddies. They were polypropylene containers with a 10-foot fuel tube, extendible handle and roller wheels. He could move the fuel about like an oversized piece of luggage and dispense the gas from the attached transfer hose.
It had been less than a week since they had spoken with Mr. Bragg. Since then, Ed and Rob had visited the Academy a couple of times, once taking Kramer with them after o
ne of the students had cut himself rather deeply with a large kitchen knife he was playing with. The teenager required a number of stiches and a dose of antibiotics. It was the first time Kramer’s medical supply stash had been called on since his arrival home.
One of the nice things to come from their mutual arrangement, other than the gasoline, was a stash of cigarettes that Raj had found. Abandoned offices at the school had turned up over a half-a-dozen cartons of tobacco products, from menthol 100’s to a carton of unfiltered Camels, Bragg would be getting a nice present for his work. Gerry laughed when he realized that he was actually excited about giving someone a bunch of cancer sticks. My, how the world had changed!
“What time should we be there?” Gerry asked his friend.
“After dark,” Ed replied. “He figures they’ll try about 7:00 or so.”
“Let’s take over some food!” Barb chirped. “I’ll bet he hasn’t had a good meal in a long while.”
They had harvested two hogs for their belated Thanksgiving dinner, and processing the animals brought them nearly a hundred pounds of usable meat. Barb had cooked both tenderloins for their celebratory meal, and the rest had been frozen and stashed in either the Kramer or Grafton’s home. Having filled up both freezers, and with the backup batteries installed and providing more than enough power at night, both Barb and Carol had almost demanded that the men bring them each a chest freezer to stash the leftover meat; they hoped that the men would continue to bring fresh meat in.
Barb brought out a large stash of chops, counting out enough for the entire group, plus extra for Vernon.
“I’ll cook these up and take some to Vernon.” She stated as she got into her “mother mode.”
“I’ll whip up some Duck Potatoes and rehydrate some green beans,” she continued as she planned the evening meal.
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