Josie was laying with her. Both had their eyes open, they knew he was standing there. They waited for him to speak.
“They got in through the front door last night,” he said plainly.
Silence from Josie and Alex.
“The latches weren’t busted, or even damage,” he continued.
More silence from the bed.
“Which means somebody left the door unlocked. GET UP, ALEXANDRIA! ON YOUR FEET!” he barked, making the walls vibrate and both the women jump.
Alex sprung out of bed and stood in front of her father, knobby knees trembling, white rabbit hanging limply in one hand. She couldn’t make eye contact.
Josie sat up in bed. “Roy…” she started.
“Look at me!” he shouted, ignoring Josie.
Alex’s head jerked up, her mouth quivering, eyes looking at her father with both fear and guilt.
“How did they get in, Alex?! Huh?! You were the last one inside, didn’t you remember to lock and latch the front god damned door?!” he shouted, gesturing wildly.
“Roy! Stop! She’s sick! What are you doing?!” Josie screamed, throwing her hands out.
Roy stepped forward and knelt next to Alex, who had curled up on the floor again and was crying loudly, rabbit clutched to her face. Josie tensed up and put a protective arm between them as Roy shouted a foot away from her head.
“Two bad men came into your house last night! Two bad men who wanted to steal from your home, and could have hurt you and Mommy and Daddy! Because YOU were careless! Do you want Mommy and Daddy to get hurt? Do you want Mommy and Daddy to get killed and leave you here all alone?” he yelled. She just continued to cry and scream into her rabbit.
“Enough, Roy! Enough!” Josie put her hands on Roy’s shoulders and pushed him away, into a standing position, and guided him out of the room.
“No more walks at night! Shouldn’t be out there anyway, I can’t believe you would be so god damned foolish!” he said, pointing back at Alex as he left the room. Josie pushed him out of the room and into the hallway.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” she said, smacking him hard on the chest.
“She needs to be disciplined!” Roy responded.
“She’s ten, and she made an honest mistake! She doesn’t understand how serious this is!” Josie said, smacking him again. Roy shook his head and stood his ground.
“She understands now, I bet! There-’ he cut himself off and lowered his voice, ‘there’s a dead body in the basement now, and another wounded man out there somewhere. And he’s bringing friends.”
Josie paused. She’d heard the gunshots, the commotion, and seen him cleaning the blood off his hands, and tossing his blood-stained clothes in the garbage. She knew he’d probably had to shoot someone, but her number one priority was staying with her daughter until the danger was past.
When Roy came back inside, he checked on them in Alex’s room, and without a word, went to the bathroom and didn’t come out until sunrise.
“How do you know there’ll be more?” Josie asked.
“The one I killed said ‘Go get the others.’ before I shot him.”
“Okay…”
“Since they’re not here already, we have to assume they’re camped out somewhere, and there could be more. I have some ideas for making this place even more defensible, which is absolutely essential now.”
Josie looked at him, hands on her hips, frowning and defiant.
“I need your help, here, baby,” he said, hooking his thumbs on his pockets. She stared him down, scanning his face, eyes darting menacingly. Slowly, she nodded, upper lip curled.
* * *
Eight hours later, the sun was low in the afternoon sky, and once again the wife and husband were panting and weary from a long day’s work. Roy looked around; the house was now laden with traps and obstacles.
In between the two barbed wire fences, there was now a layer of wooden pallets with nails and screws sticking up out of them, all between six and eight inches long. They’d taken special care to pull the long grass out there between the slats in the pallets, so that the boards would be a little more disguised.
Roy also spent an hour collecting sage brush and other bushes to place between the fences, the better to conceal the nail boards.
Closer to the house, underneath every boarded up window, was a five-foot pit with sharpened dowels and sharpened PVC piping sticking out from all angles along the walls and bottom. The tops of these kill pits were covered with a simple sheet of cardboard and dirt scattered on top. Anybody who tried to break into a window would fall and impale themselves in one of several grievous ways.
The gate was reinforced with extra piping and what remained of the planks, and Roy strung trip wires around the perimeter in two places. The trip wires were armed with military-grade illumination flares.
“We’ll be ready for them… whenever they come.” Roy said. Josie nodded, ignoring the fact that he did nothing to hide the excitement in his voice.
Chapter 6
Roy sat in the den, on the back of the couch, his scoped Colt AR-15 at the ready and peering out the slot in the window at the fence and front gates.
It had been several hours past sundown, and he didn’t know when the wounded man would return with the rest of his company. Roy didn’t know if they would return, but better safe than sorry.
At very least it would show Josie that he was serious about this, taking his job seriously, taking their safety seriously. He’d never admit it, but he was sorry he yelled at his daughter. He wasn’t sorry, however, that it had made an impression and that the lesson was probably well learned.
His thoughts drifted, and his eyes drifted with them, across the room and into the kitchen which was lit by a single electric lantern. What was the world going to look like when she was grown up? It didn’t matter, she would grow up because he was here to protect her, and his wife.
Suddenly, a shrill hissing sound came from the front yard, accompanied by an explosion of red light. Roy jerked back to attention and scanned like a hawk out the window. The red light illuminated the whole yard, front to back. Several figures had just reached the fence, and were momentarily stunned at the red light.
“JOSIE! We’ve got company!” he shouted into the back of the house.
He heard her run to Alex’s room without a word, and then the sound of two pairs of feet flew down the wooden stairs into the basement. Roy didn’t take his eyes off the front yard.
He counted three men, too dark to tell if they were armed, but they were all climbing over the fence. His rifle scope was already dialed in on the fence-line, and just in case somebody got too close, he had his trusty Beretta.
He peered through the night-vision scope and zeroed in on the first man climbing the fence: an enormous specimen with a crew cut who, for some reason, appeared to have a pair of aviators on his head even though it was nighttime.
He was crouched precariously on the edge of the fence, in the middle of hurdling it, looking around in confusion, apparently taken by surprise by the flares. Roy took a breath, targeted the man’s forehead, and FIRED.
Just before he fired, the man moved over the edge of the fence, and his hand vanished in a misty puff of blood and viscera, like the streamers from a kids party-popper.
The 5.56x45mm round had struck his wrist, and the man now flung his ragged forearm around. With a panicked scream, he lost his balance and fell with all his weight to the ground, landing on his back onto a pallet of nails.
The man froze as he hit the ground, back arched, body stricken and remaining hand curled in agony.
His screaming rose from fear and shock to the terror of a mortally wounded animal. The nail through his left ear indicated how close to piercing his skull he’d come, and as he writhed to escape, every twitch ripped fire and nausea through his body from the epicenters of the 6-8 inch long screws and nails that held him in place on the pallet. He stopped writhing and began to quietly shiver.
“One
down…” Roy grunted. The second figure on the fence jumped down as Roy first fired, and Roy watched as the man landed with both feet, and immediately collapsed with a shriek and swearing as he put a nail through his right foot.
His swearing continued as he collapsed and hit another nail as his right hand broke his fall, and a third sank under his kneecap as he knelt to catch himself. Roy zeroed in on the man’s head, but a loud scraping sound drew his attention.
The third intruder had jumped back off the first fence and had dragged opened the first gate. Now he crept at a crouch towards the second gate.
“Wait for it…” Roy muttered to himself. The second gate opened and the man kept creeping forward, motivated by some unknown force.
SNAP.
Another agonized howl as the man at the gates stepped onto a cleverly-hidden bear trap that Roy had sharpened with a grinder.
The man flailed and fell forwards, grasping at his mangled foot and whimpering as he felt his muscle and tendons slowly tear.
Roy zeroed in on the man’s head, and when he curled up on his back and held still while gingerly trying to pry the trap open, his head snapped to one side as the exit wound scattered brains and blood across the dirt yard. The lifeless body fell limp on the ground.
“Roy! ROY!” Josie shouted from the back room. “There’s three of them coming from the back! They’re on the fence!”
Roy clicked the safety on and jogged to the back hallway where the back door was boarded shut. As he approached, he saw a man armed with a crow bar and a pistol in his waistband run right up to the house and go for one of the windows.
Then without a sound, the ground gave way beneath him, and his lower half disappeared into the kill pit. He caught himself with his hands, his armpits level with the edge, and started shrieking, his eyes and mouth wide with pain and shock as he grasped at the one-inch-wide wooden dowels that protruded through his ribs, waist, and legs. From his gasping mouth came a high-pitched retching.
Roy saw the man go down, then turned his sights on the back yard. A second convict was running straight for the back door.
Josie looked at Roy, who held his fire. Immediately, the attacker’s legs vanished in a thunderous explosion that scattered clothes and gore into the yard.
His body cartwheeled into the air, flinging bowels and landed with a wind-knocking thud on the ground. Immediately, what was left of the man began to wail, a slowly rising wail of indescribable terror and shock, and vainly, desperately, looked around and began to drag itself towards the fence.
Suddenly its head snapped forward and the back of the skull split apart with clumps of gore erupting upwards.
The last of the three attackers saw the carnage and, though he was just a few yards from the house, turned and sprinted back towards the fence.
Roy stared down his sights and, with a wicked open-mouthed grin, fired a three-round burst just to the left of the retreating attacker. The man jumped and instinctively took two steps to the right, away from the shots fired, and with another bone-shuddering explosion, his right leg and most of his left were in tatters beneath him.
He shrieked as he fell -- Josie had never heard a human being makes sounds like this. Ever since the attack started, the air was thick with the screams of the maimed and dying.
The last attacker moaned and clutched at his ruined bleeding stumps as he began to hyperventilate. He took only a few short breaths before Roy’s mercy bullet turned most of the man’s face into a mangled, unidentifiable mess.
Roy shouldered his AR-15 and jogged to the front room again. No sign of the second man over the fence, with the nails through his foot and knee and hand.
The whole engagement lasted less than ten minutes, but it was long enough for him to have gotten away.
The man impaled in the killing pit out back was still moaning incoherently. Roy stepped back to the back door, opened the latches, and marched cautiously to the man in the pit, keeping his rifle up the whole way.
The poor man was beyond help: both his upper legs, one of his ankles, his waist through the pelvis and out his stomach, and through his ribs, all were pierced by the sharpened dowels. He twitched, and writhed, stuck to where he stood, clutching at the stakes and at the empty air.
Roy leveled his rifle at the man’s head, and fired. He turned to see Josie standing in the doorway, a look of such repulsion and shock on her face so terrible that he almost didn’t recognize her.
“Go make sure our daughter is okay,” Roy said flatly.
Chapter 7
The next morning, the pale sun illuminated the carnage of the night before. The stiff, mangled corpses of the ill-fated assailants were scattered across the barren lawn.
Crows circled overhead and perched on the fence posts, laughing among themselves as they eyed the killing field. Blood stained the ground all around the home and spattered the walls, marking the locations of the fallen and their executions by Roy’s ruthless trigger finger.
Inside the house, Josie set breakfast on the table: powdered eggs, a glass of water and half an apple for everyone, and the last of the bacon. Roy sat down and set his rifle next to him leaning against the table.
Alex sat down at her place and glanced between her father and the rifle and the windows.
“Don’t you go near any of those windows, Alex. I mean it. You don’t need to see any of that,” Josie said sternly as she set Roy’s plate in front of him with a clunk and took her seat.
The three of them sat in silence for a moment before Roy started in on his food. Josie interrupted him:
“Roy, would you say grace, please?” she asked, politely if not with some discomfort, eyeing him sidelong. Roy dropped the piece of bacon back on the plate, and folded his hands as he sat back with a sigh and a grunt.
“Praise the Lord… and pass the ammunition,” he said, an edge of snark in his tone as he went back to the bacon and winked at his daughter.
She made eye contact for a moment before nervously breaking her gaze and starting on her breakfast. Josie stared at her husband as she sipped on her water.
“Roy… there were explosions outside last night. When those men got close enough to the house… what was that?” she asked, though she already knew the answer. He looked up at her with arched eyebrows, either indifferent or incredulous at her question.
“Mines…” he said, through a mouthful, glancing around before going back to his food. He felt the air grow a little colder, and he looked back up at her. Josie’s face puckered with anger, and her eyes narrowed on him.
“I didn’t have time to tell you, okay? And what does it matter? Alex ain’t walking around out there anymore, neither are you. And we were expecting them. And obviously it was necessary.” he said in a casual, dismissive tone.
She glowered and folded her hands in her lap.
“Where did you get those kinds of weapons, Roy?” she said, spitting out his name like it hurt her teeth.
“I made ‘em,” he said with the same casual tone, without looking up from his plate. “At my workbench.”
“You… had those in our house?!” she hissed through gritted teeth, hands and head trembling with rage. The muscles in her neck flexed as she turned to her daughter.
“Take your food to your room, baby,” she said.
“Okay…” Alex said quickly, clearly wanting to leave.
“SIT,” Roy said in a half-shout, still digging into his plate. He glanced over at her, and then back at his wife.
“Okay… you want to know the truth about the war? About what it was like in the combat zone?” he said, putting down his fork and tossing his napkin on an empty plate. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, never taking his eyes off Josie.
“The whole thing was such a damned mess, and we got to play in it. I got stranded with my unit in a small outpost out in the middle of nowhere, some filthy dirt mountain range nobody gave enough of a shit about to even name.” he said, voice taking on a dark, matter-of-fact tone.
“We were out there for a whole week, pinned down by insurgents. They must have sent the whole force after us, and we just held our ground and kept pickin’ them off as they came. We ate whatever we could by the end, including the birds that came in to eat the dead. Water was rationed so tight we had to drink our own piss. Choppers tried to come get us but it was too hot. Airstrikes didn’t do squat, the hajjis just hid in their holes and waited. It was just us, and them, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. And eventually, they stopped coming, and we humped it out.” He leaned forward on the table.
Our Survival: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (Grid Down Book 1) Page 4
