Bill’s suspicions about what he was doing down in a dark turbine room were confirmed when he heard a familiar voice not too far away say, “Captain William Henry ‘Wild Bill’ Chandler, U S M C. Did you ever get promoted to Major, or did you get a little bit of what you gave, and get stuck at Captain?”
Bill didn’t say anything.
“Don’t matter. Looks like you got out a while ago. Living a few hundred miles from here, according to your driver’s license. Got some nice pictures in your wallet, too. A little waterlogged from your roll in the lake, but it seems like you’ve got a pretty wife and a couple of nice kids. She was the one with you on the lake?”
Bill mentally kicked himself for not putting his wallet into a plastic bag in his ruck. Back when he was in the Corps, he never would have risked getting captured with family pictures on him. Give the enemy absolutely nothing they could use against you.
That thought gave him something, though. A tool he could use, old training he could bring up, old strength and resolve. “William Henry Chandler, Captain, 520-65-5524, June 17th 1974.” He heard Benton start striding towards him, steady and confident despite the complete darkness.
“Good,” Benton said. “You’ve figured out what’s going on and how things are going to go. Smart man.”
Bill repeated his name, rank, service number, and date of birth.
“Interesting thing about this dam. Water’s still flowing through the turbines, and they’re still cranking the generators. This thing is kicking out the kilowatts by the thousand right now, but none of it’s usable. Even in this very room, mere feet from the generators, I can’t turn on a single light bulb. The systems that make the electricity flow from the generators to the power lines are all computerized, and they’re all fried. Even the switch that was supposed to disengage the turbines from the generators is toast. Fortunately, there is one final mechanical failsafe in the system, that kicked in and is grounding all of that excess electricity. I’ve got some smart people here, though. They’re figuring out a way to patch into that ground circuit and see if they can get me some juice.”
Bill kept repeating the same information over and over again, taking solace in the simple ritual of reciting name, rank, service number, and date of birth.
“But that’s neither here nor there. I didn’t come down here to talk infrastructure. I’m here to talk about you. I’m guessing you were either up here on a little vacation with the wifey while the kids are at grandma’s, or you’ve got some property up in this area. If every damn computer within hundreds of miles weren’t a paperweight, I could use the powers given me in this state of emergency to go into county records and see if there are any deeds in your name around here. Would probably take me a whole minute. Unfortunately, that’s not an option right now. I suppose I could dispatch somebody to go get some flunky that worked for the local government to get me that info, but that would take quite a while. Besides, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun as getting it directly from you. So, what do you think Wild Bill? How long do you think you’ll hold out before you give up your wife and kids?”
Bill mentally retreated farther into his ritual.
“You know how I knew those shitheads I was conversing with in Kandahar were illegal combatants and not legitimate soldiers? They didn’t know about that name and rank bullshit. They just whined and wailed and begged for their lives as I knocked them down, one by one.”
Bill remembered the day Benton was talking about. He’d heard rumors from the locals that an American special ops officer had been sweeping up whole families and torturing them for information – parents, kids, grandparents, anybody that had been in the house when he decided that was the one he wanted. He and his translators spend a few weeks trying to get any more information than that, when one boy finally screwed up the courage to tell them how to find the remote farm where the interrogations happened. Bill took his company out on patrol and personally led the fire team that busted into the house and interrupted Benton and two other men. Three of the seven people in the room were already dead, and Bill remembered vividly thinking that the most merciful thing he could have done for the boy they had been working over would be a coup de grace.
“Ahhh,” Benton said. “Taking a little trip down memory lane?”
Bill realized then that he’d faltered in his recitations.
“Yeah. You remember, don’t you, Wild Bill? You suppose I’ve lost my touch after all these years, or is it more like riding a bicycle?”
Bill heard the sound of Benton slapping something against his hand, something that sounded leathery and flexible.
Chapter 15
“Where did that come from?” Cole asked.
“I think behind the house.” Jenny was immediately up on her feet, and went to start blowing out their lanterns, lest any light at all bleed around the blackout curtains. Cole went to the center of the cabin and grabbed their two rifles.
“Hope it’s just a raccoon or a squirrel or something,” Cole said.
“Might be that mountain lion, coming to finish the job on me,” Jenny said, with a little laugh.
Cole gave her a playful half-punch on the arm, glad for the slight break in the sudden tension in the room.
“Get that last lantern,” Jenny said, pointing to the kitchen. Once the inside of the cabin was completely dark, Jenny pulled the curtain over one of the rear windows aside. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, she was able to make out the edge of the mowed yard around the property, but didn’t see any movement. “I think we need to start keeping each of the windows cracked,” she whispered. “We heard the trap, but we’re deaf to any other sounds out there.”
“Think it’s worth it to open ‘em up a little bit now?” Cole asked.
“Yeah.”
They each slowly slid open the windows they were stationed at, agonizing over even that little bit of sound. Jenny held her breath as she sunk down to put her chin on the window sill. She heard nothing from outside but a little breeze and the typical hum and buzz of the nighttime insects and critters. From the times she’d been out hunting, she knew that was a little bit of a good sign. It meant nothing was disturbing their usual routines. Sudden silence from out in the yard would have been much more troubling.
“How long should we stand watch and wait?” Jenny asked.
“All night. Until we get a chance to get out in the daytime and check the noisemaker to see what might have set it off.”
“My kingdom for a dozen trail cams and a working laptop,” Jenny said.
“Hush…”
For several more minutes, they kept their ears open while they stared into the tree line, barely breathing, until two shots rang out in the darkness. Both of them startled at the sound.
“That was closer to the driveway,” Cole said, moving to one of the front windows of the house, and pulling it open a crack.
“I’m going to keep watch out the back,” Jenny said, bringing her rifle to the ready.
“Right.”
“Nothing hit the house?”
“No,” Jenny said. She barely breathed, cheek to the stock of her rifle, looking over the barrel. Meanwhile, she could hear Cole’s breath rushing in and out. “Settle down, or you won’t be able to hit anything,” she hissed at him.
“Trying.”
“Damn it!” Jenny tilted her head to put a moving form into her sight picture. It seemed human sized and was coming out of the woods, looking like it was going to try and cover behind a corner of their shed. Her parents had taken her to the range regularly since she’d been ten, so the muscle memory took over, and she gently pulled the trigger back.
The report of the rifle seemed louder than she ever remembered it being before. It kicked into her shoulder, but she kept her eyes on target as it jerked backwards and fell to the ground.
“Cole! I just shot somebody. I just shot somebody I think!”
“Stay steady, make sure nobody else is coming.”
The two held their places a
t their windows, Cole trying to force his lungs to go easy, Jenny fighting the urge to throw up. They waited for a hail of bullets to come at them, or for more people to come out of the woods, or a Molotov cocktail, or anything.
What they were not expecting, from the side of the house, was their mother’s voice.
“Cole. JJ. I’m over by where the swing set used to be. Don’t shoot me.”
Chapter 16
“I’m pretty impressed at how you’re holding out, Wild Bill. Even by Marine standards, you’re tough. Real tough. Must be because there’s something truly valuable on the line for you.”
Bill could barely hear Benton over the rushing background noise of the turbine room, the ringing in his ears, and the general fog of having been roundly beaten unconscious, roused up, beaten unconscious again, and doused with cold water to wake him up again.
“Thing is, plain old kicking the shit out of you isn’t going to get the job done. I know, and you know, that I’m likely to kill you or bust you down to a vegetable before you’ll give up the goods. So let’s just say, between you and me, that this first round was for fun, alright? Just me venting some old anger at you having jacked my career. I could be retired by now, collecting a colonel’s pension, maybe a general’s, if I had gotten lucky. But, no. You came in, little Taliban-loving white knight, and made a whole bunch of fuss. And even though I’d been able to clean things up, make sure there wasn’t ever enough evidence to stand up at the court-martial, the stink of it still stuck to me. Affected my trajectory, and I never did pass a board after that.”
Bill coughed, tasting blood in his mouth. He spat a big gob of it towards the sound of Benton’s voice.
“Anyway, now that I’ve got that out of my system, I don’t need to dwell on the past anymore. Time to think about the future. About meeting your wife and kids, bringing them here to see you. Tomorrow, Billy Boy, we start working on that.”
Bill heard Benton step away a few steps, then approach again, setting a few things on the concrete floor, and then clicking a lighter. The small blue flame was almost painful to Bill’s eyes after so much time in the pitch black room. He squinted as Benton lit a small tea light and put it down next to an uncapped quart canteen and an MRE a few feet from the pipe he was shackled to. There were blood stains on the bare concrete floor.
After his tormentor left, Bill carefully wriggled around to get his feet around the canteen and pull it close without knocking it over and spilling its contents. After the beatings he just took and with that MRE in front of him, he knew he’d need every single drop of water he could get into himself to stay strong.
He drank down half the canteen in one go, and saved the rest until he’d finished the MRE. Once he got some food into himself, he stood up and started stretching out. The clammy, hard concrete floor was not going to any good for his muscles or joints, even without the rough treatment he’d just been subjected to. Next, he did what exercises he could with his limited range of motion, to get some healing blood flowing to the bones and muscles, and keep his body heat up. He guessed he’d been at it for about twenty minutes when suddenly his stomach started roiling.
At first, he wrote it off as just the aftereffects of the trauma to his body, maybe some lingering upset from whatever they’d put in his food the day before to knock him out enough that they were able to move him down into the turbine room and lock him up. He slowed the pace of his exercising a little, but resolved to keep his body moving as much as he could. A few more squats, and his guts shouted a message to him loud and clear. He got his pants undone and down just before releasing a torrent of diarrhea. That was followed by a round of vomiting that kept going until he was dry heaving, and pretty sure his liver was coming up next.
With his hands cuffed to a pipe in front of him, Bill wasn’t able to clean himself up after the violent round of sickness. He also knew he’d need his clothes to be reasonably clean for any escape, so he kicked off his pants and put them as far away from the mess he’d made as he could.
But he only allowed himself a couple minutes of rest, before he went back to his exercises, to help his body recover and keep his mind active and focused.
Chapter 17
Even thought she’d heard Cole say he wasn’t going to shoot, Sally covered the ground from the tree line to the cabin as fast as she could in a crouch, waiting for a bullet from either direction. It was only after she got in the front door, shut it, and didn’t hear a gunshot that she finally unclenched.
“Mom!” both kids yelled.
“Quiet!” she scolded them, not sure how many others might be surrounding the cabin.
“OK, OK,” Cole said. Jenny just came up to her at a fast walk and threw her arms around her mother.
“I’m alright, last I saw your dad he was fine, let’s get back on line,” Sally said, dropping the two bug-out bags she’d been carrying. “Shotgun?” she asked. Cole retrieved it for her before going back to his position at the front of the house.
Over the next hour, in whispers, she told them about her trip with Bill from Eureka to the lake, him getting captured by the Army so she could continue on and her encounter with the one looter that had been thrown from the truck early that morning.
“I was waiting until it got a little bit darker before coming up the drive when I heard your little rattle trap. Stopped me dead in my tracks, and I heard somebody come tromping out towards the road. When I saw that he was armed and wasn’t one of you two, I figured he wasn’t up to any good.”’
“That must have been the shot we’d heard,” Jenny said. “Then I think I got somebody else coming in from the back. He’s still out there. Hasn’t moved, hasn’t made a sound.”
“Why don’t you come here and watch the side of the house,” Sally said. “I’ll cover the back for a bit.”
As mother and daughter passed each other in the darkness, Jenny very quietly whispered, “Thanks.”
When she got to the window, Sally was able to make out a dark shape prone on the grass. It was likely the person that Jenny had shot. While they sat in the darkness, listening for anything else that might be coming at them, Sally reviewed the situation to herself. The man she’d shot wasn’t military or police as near as she could tell from her brief check of the body. Him and whoever it was in the back left her with two bodies she and the kids would need to dispose of. They mentioned hearing a truck up the road a ways, one that she’d heard herself.
One part of her wanted to get at the truck. A running motor vehicle could be a great asset under the current conditions. On the other hand, it made noise. And there’d been gunfire. That was going to bring attention to the area, and the last thing she wanted was anybody else sniffing around the cabin.
“Look, kids. We’re going to need to be bold. I think we need to assume that it was just the two guys. We need their bodies off our property real fast…”
Chapter 18
Bill had no idea how long he’d been out, but he woke to a lit candle, a canteen of water, and another MRE. He was aware that he was parched and starving, but the smell left over from his first meal down in the turbine room turned his stomach. The thought of drinking any more water, with whatever Benton had spiked it with, was too much for him to overcome.
Instead, he stretched out his tight muscles, wincing at the pain from the bruises and cuts, and did what calisthenics he had the energy for. When he couldn’t muster up the strength to keep going, he opened the MRE and dug in. Since it was sealed, he assumed it would be safe to eat. It was hard going, with his mouth so dry, but he eventually got it all down. Everything except the coffee. The caffeine was a diuretic, and he knew he’d need to be as tight on fluids as he possibly could under the circumstances.
When the food had been in him for a good long while with no sign of stomach upset or nausea, he finally gave in to his thirst. As he used his feet to pull the canteen closer, he hoped that the food had been in him long enough to get some nutrition out of it.
He tried to detect the taste of
anything unusual in the water as he took a few cautious sips, but with the stale taste of vomit in his mouth underneath the heavy flavors of the MRE, coupled with dehydration, he couldn’t have picked out much of anything. As much as a part of him wanted to chug the whole thing, he knew better. He took just enough water to clean out his mouth and take the edge off his intense thirst, then set the canteen aside.
Between his physical condition, the beating, the drugged food and water, the noise in the turbine room, Bill’s head was pounding. He was exhausted, but also knew that the discomfort would keep him from trying to sleep if he decided to just curl up and shut his eyes. He’d get more sleep when his body shut down enough that he just lost consciousness.
Besides that, he knew that it wasn’t just going to laxatives and emetics in the water, and a lot of loud noise. Those kinds of stresses would take a while to break a person down. If Benton really wanted to get at his family, he’d have to step it up or be prepared for a long wait. Pondering what else was in store was a thought train Bill didn’t want to get on, but as his head continued to pound and the roar of the water turbines continued to assail his ears, it was hard to get his mind off of it.
He didn’t realize until he was almost through it, that he’d been absentmindedly sipping at the canteen while he tried to figure out what was going to come next. Several minutes with food and water in him, and his stomach was staying still. “OK,” he said in to the noisy darkness. “Make it so I can’t tell if the water is good or not. Got it.”
Our Survival: A Collection of Post Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thrillers Page 55
