by Lee Bradford
Jeb nodded as he and Allan left.
Paul removed the magazine from his pistol and checked to see how many rounds he had left. “Can you still track Autumn’s whereabouts?” he asked Craig.
“Ark Three, top floor,” he replied.
“Forget heading there by tram,” Buck said. “By now most of Ark Two’s probably in flames. Best to head through the Park.”
They reached Ark Three and came under fire as soon as they exited the airlock. Buck charged in first, laying down an impressive volley with the AA-12 automatic shotgun he was carrying. Ava, Paul and Craig quickly followed suit. This area would be the linchpin since it led to the blast doors and the parking area beyond. Already, streams of Ark employees were fleeing the battle. Van Buren’s men didn’t seem to care, however, and they fired through the groups in the hopes of making a lucky hit.
The bulk of the opposition in the Atrium was coming from a group of guards sheltered behind the security desk. Every few seconds, one of them would pop his head out and squeeze off a few rounds and whenever they did, Buck responded with a burst from his shotgun. The sound of the weapon was scary enough, not to mention the noise the buckshot made as it slammed into the desk and wall beyond. The guards were pinned down, which gave Paul and the others the opportunity to circle around.
When they reached the desk, Ava was the one to do the deed and cut the men down with her SIG. Now the only sound came from the scattered groups of people trying to escape.
“This way,” Craig said, urging them toward the bank of elevators.
They scrambled inside, Ava punching the access code before the doors slid shut.
They would have about a minute to check their ammo and reload weapons before they reached the tenth floor, except for Buck, whose auto shotgun held a hundred rounds.
Soft music played.
“That Neil Diamond?” Paul asked.
“Sweet Caroline,” Buck grunted.
Paul racked the slide on his pistol, chambering a round.
Craig checked the tablet.
“Head right,” he instructed them. “Third door on the left.”
“That’s Van Buren’s office,” Ava said, concerned.
With a gentle ping, the elevator swooshed open. The hallway vibrated with flashing red emergency lights, making it hard to see. One by one, they moved out, scanning both sides as they did.
“Clear,” Ava called out.
Buck looked left. “Clear.”
Slowly they worked their way down the corridor. There was no one within sight, no guards or government types in suits pleading to be spared. Papers scattered on the ground spoke of people fleeing in a great hurry.
“Through here,” Craig whispered, pointing.
Buck stepped forward and planted his foot next to the handle, kicking open the door, revealing the room where Van Buren’s secretary sat, but it wasn’t empty. Inside were three Secret Service agents. Two of them were loading weapons and the third was stuffing gold and silver coins into a knapsack.
Startled, the three agents moved to raise their weapons, but Buck got there first. Three thunderous blasts and each of them was thrown back, falling to the floor dead.
A pair of mahogany double doors led to Van Buren’s office and the four of them pushed their way inside. In the center of the room, two stretchers were laid out. Autumn lay in the left, Susan in the right. They were both strapped down with terrified expressions. Van Buren was holding a syringe in the side of Susan’s neck, his thumb on the depressor.
“Drop your weapons at once,” Van Buren shouted, “or I’ll pump her full of this stuff.”
Shooting the director from here risked hitting one or both of the women. More importantly, there wasn’t any guarantee doing so would prevent him from emptying that syringe.
While Buck laid his shotgun on the table and Ava and Craig did the same with their own weapons, Paul had slipped his pistol under his waistband.
“Your sleight of hand needs work, Mr. Edwards. I won’t ask you again.” Van Buren jiggled the needle in Susan’s neck and she screamed.
“Okay, okay,” Paul said, putting the gun on the table and raising his hands. He hoped Ava or Buck still had a weapon on them. With no better options, they would have to play along for now.
Van Buren sneered. “I saw the message you sent to the other bunkers ordering them to destroy their copies of the virus,” he told Ava. “Very clever. I won’t even ask why. I thought you understood what we were doing here, thought you had vision and the guts to do what was needed, but I see now that I was wrong.”
Another door opened behind Van Buren and President Perkins walked in wielding a machete. The director grinned when he saw him.
“Did you bring the biosuit?”
“Of course,” Perkins said, eyeing the four at the other end of the room.
“You’re going to infect Susan and put her in that suit, aren’t you?” Ava said, her hand inching toward her gun on the table.
“Nonsense,” he said. “These two lovely ladies are our tickets out of here. Do as you’re told and we’ll let them go when we’ve reached a safe distance.”
He was lying and even Paul could see that.
“Go collect their weapons,” he told Perkins.
Buck stirred and Paul felt a chill run up his spine. The old man wasn’t going to let that happen. Losing their guns was tantamount to a death sentence. None of them were that stupid.
Perkins was passing behind Van Buren when two things happened in rapid succession.
Buck pulled out a hidden pistol.
Perkins raised his machete and brought it down, slicing off Van Buren’s right hand at the wrist.
The director’s face became a mask of horror as he stared down in disbelief, blood pumping onto the floor at his feet from his severed limb. In a desperate act of self-preservation, he screamed, clutching the stump to his chest to stop the bleeding before falling backwards.
Perkins plucked the needle from Susan’s neck. He then looked directly at Ava.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked.
“For one simple reason,” he told her. “I like fast cars.”
And a light went on in Paul’s head. Perkins was one of the two agents Ava had been waiting for.
The syringe was still in Perkins’ hand as Buck, Paul and the others rushed over to untie the women. When Perkins held it up to the light, his face began to darken.
“I think we have a problem,” he said, as Van Buren continued to moan in agony behind him.
“What is it?” Paul asked, helping Autumn to her feet.
Perkins showed him the needle. Most of the liquid inside was gone. Paul turned to his wife and then to the others.
“What is it?” Susan asked in a panicked voice, pressing her hand against the side of her neck.
“Some of the virus might have got into you,” Paul told her. He turned to Ava. “What do we do? Isn’t there a cure?”
From the floor, Van Buren was making strange noises that sounded to Paul a lot like laughter. “There was,” he said in a barely audible whisper. “But you destroyed it when you blew up the labs.”
Paul turned to Buck and Ava, who both shook their heads.
“We didn’t know,” Buck said, oozing guilt and remorse.
Van Buren was still laughing when Paul snatched his pistol off the table and emptied it into him.
Autumn’s hands clamped over her ears as she cried. The others stared on in surprise. Not because the man hadn’t deserved it, more that Paul had been the one to do the deed. He was still clutching the pistol, the slide all the way back, when Buck pushed his hands down.
“Come,” the old man said. “We need to get Susan into the suit. Keep the virus from spreading.”
Paul dropped the pistol and turned to his wife. Tears were rolling down her cheeks as her feet were being fed in one at a time. He’d seen the stats on simian hemorrhagic fever just like the rest of them had. Susan had a forty percent chance of pulling through this.
As the zipper was pulled closed, her face distorted by the plastic visor, he squeezed her hand and told her how much he loved her.
Chapter 44
By the time they made it out of the bunker and into the underground parking area, the streams fleeing the facility had dwindled to a trickle. Thankfully, the Hummer was still in the same spot where Susan had first left it.
Carefully, they emptied out the rear cargo hold and loaded Susan inside, making sure to keep her propped up and comfortable. On the way down, Paul had made the mistake of asking where Brett was. His daughter had burst into tears and was still crying as she lifted herself into the back seat of the Hummer and fastened her seat belt.
With no sign of Jeb, Allan or the rest of his crew, Paul could only hope that they’d made it out safely.
“Well, I guess this is it,” Buck said, one clenched fist perched against his hip in a careless manner. He was trying hard to convince Ava he wasn’t sad to see her go, but Paul was sure no one was buying into his tricks.
Next to her was Perkins, his suit caked with Van Buren’s blood. The mystery of the second missing secret agent had also been revealed. He had been posing as Perkins’ assistant, a man killed during the detonation in Baltimore harbor.
“Are you sure you’ll have enough fuel?” she asked.
Buck pointed to an eighteen-wheeler parked a hundred feet away. “I’ll top her up by syphoning from that transport truck.” He paused. “Which way are the two of you headed?”
“Not sure yet,” Ava told him, rubbing her palms against her legs. “First thing is to make contact with our headquarters and let them know the virus has been neutralized. After that we’ll await further orders.”
“You do have a man in high office now,” Paul said. “That’s gotta be worth something.”
Perkins smiled. “I hope it is.”
“I just wish you’d put a stop to Van Buren before things spun so far out of control,” Buck said.
“There was a window to act and we missed it,” Perkins explained, or at least tried to. “Even in my organization, there’s a bureaucracy that stifles an agent’s freedom of action.”
Buck didn’t seem to be buying it, but Paul was in no mood to leave on bad terms.
“I’d ask for your phone number,” Buck said to Ava. “But something tells me it’ll be a while before phones of any kind are up and running again.”
“I read your file,” she said with a wink. “I know where to find you.”
They parted ways then, Buck watching as Ava and Perkins disappeared back into the Ark.
The stop to fill the fuel tank and jerry cans was quicker than expected and before they knew it, they were heading outside.
Emerging from the underground parking, they were struck at once by piercing rays of early-morning sunshine.
“You don’t trust them, do you, Buck?” Paul asked, as the Hummer rolled out of Sugarloaf Mountain and onto the pontoon bridge.
“I don’t trust anyone,” he replied matter-of-factly. “You know that. But it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to know they’d purposely held back from taking out Van Buren and his people sooner.”
“For what reason?”
“Let the Brotherhood do all the dirty work, that’s why. That way they could come along and scoop the country up for a rock-bottom price after it was all shot to hell.”
Paul glanced back at Susan to make sure she was okay. Through the back window, he watched the mountain shrinking into the distance. He couldn’t have been happier to see it go.
Chapter 45
The sights they encountered on the rest of the journey home were distressing, to say the least. Highways pockmarked with abandoned cars. Dead bodies scattered along the road, their bones picked over by crows and other wild animals. It wouldn’t be too much longer before nature reclaimed what was left of the country.
Paul still wasn’t sure what to make of Buck’s suggestion that the secret organization Ava worked for had failed to prevent the country’s downfall. It certainly didn’t bode well and yet, given the choice, he would gladly take Perkins’ stewardship over Van Buren’s and for one simple reason. Perkins’ valiant attempt to save Susan had demonstrated the one character trait Van Buren had sorely lacked: empathy.
They were less than three miles from home when Susan died. Her symptoms had started that first evening—much earlier than expected—and within twenty-four hours, her chances for recovery had gone from decent to grim.
Her body was buried beside the barn on Buck’s property. Afterward, they’d each taken turns reciting a prayer, Paul wondering the whole way through where he would find the strength to carry on. But the answer was clear and standing on either side of him.
Following an inspection of both properties, they soon discovered that both homes had been looted during their absence. For now it was safer if they stayed in Buck’s bunker, although next to the Ark it felt positively microscopic. Still, for the first time in a while, Paul and Autumn truly felt safe.
With time on his hands, Paul couldn’t stop his mind from spinning in all kinds of directions. Many of those thoughts centered around the devastating impact of Susan’s death. The Brits often used ‘gutted’ to describe a sense of deep despair and that was exactly how he felt.
When he wasn’t trying to remember the sound of his wife’s voice, he was busy thinking about what was left of the country.
No doubt about it, America had been irrevocably transformed as a consequence of the attacks and by forces far greater than anything which had shaped her during all her past wars combined. It was a rather ironic twist that borne from that loss and tragedy came an opportunity to rebuild. To do things better than they had in the past. To create a place where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness weren’t only words on an aging piece of parchment. They were emblazoned with a renewed sense of meaning.
Paul knew Susan would have agreed.
Thank you for reading
Long Road to Survival (Book 2)!
If you enjoyed this series,
then you’re sure to love Last Stand:
Last Stand: Surviving America’s Collapse (Book 1)
Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2)
Last Stand: Warlords (Book 3)
Last Stand: Turning the Tide (Book 4)
Want to be notified about a new release?
Join my mailing list!
CLICK HERE!
