Sanctuary: After It Happened Book 5

by Devon C. Ford

  Recognising that he might have caused some offence by his reaction, he proceeded to give a few orders which he was certain would have been pre-empted.

  “Put everyone on two-minute drills,” he instructed his small council of advisors.

  “Done,” said Mitch.

  “And double the guard,” Dan said.

  “Done,” said Mitch again.

  “The woods,” he tried. “Guards posted at the rear?”

  “Done,” chimed in Leah, “and Jimmy’s put up some noise traps with string and tin cans.”

  Good, Dan thought; they had done everything he would have done and they had done it quickly. Allowing them to feel proud of themselves for having performed the tasks before being told would lift their spirits, he knew. It was as close as he could come at the time to giving praise, but he was just too damned fearful of others. He felt too vulnerable.

  “Did you get anything from the radio?” Neil asked him.

  Digging into a pouch on the front of his vest for the pad of paper he had used caused a flurry of activity as Ash leapt up from his resting spot thinking that something edible was being produced. Seeing it was just a piece of paper, he settled back down to wait for the next opportunity.

  As he read his own rough translations aloud, the others listened intently.

  “Survivors. Security. Family. Impregnable. Resist. Generations. Life? Sanctuary. Fort. South.”

  Silence greeted him. Followed by a flurry of questions, none of which he could hear clearly as all the others were speaking. Holding up both hands to ward off the storm, he answered them all at once.

  “I don’t know what it means, I don’t know where it is and I didn’t get it all. It could be a warning to stay away, it could be an invitation to join them or it could lead to nothing. Right now, we need to focus on the immediate and worry about this afterwards. Leah, Neil, Mitch, with me, please.”

  With that, he walked out of the hut and into the square. His chosen companions knew him well enough by this point to wait until he had lit a cigarette before asking anything else.

  “If I’m being honest with myself, the message sounds hopeful.” He let that sink in and looked at the three pairs of eyes in front of him before he went on. “But the main problem is that we don’t have a clue where this place is until we get a stronger signal; it says ‘south’ and that’s the direction we need to go. The problem with getting a stronger signal is that one of us has to travel at least a day away from here to try again, and now that we have company, then that seems unlikely.”

  “I’ll go,” said Neil, launching into a defence before the challenges were made. “Look, you three are soldiers and I’m an old git who fixes engines. You’re needed here more than I am right now.”

  “No,” said Dan. “Thank you, mate, but that’s exactly the reason you need to be with the group. I’ll go, but not until we’ve figured out what that woman wants.”

  Mitch’s face coloured slightly as he instantly regretted his adolescent description of the visitor to Dan.

  “So what? We just wait for them to come back?” Leah asked, annoyed at the prospect of inaction.

  “Yes,” said Dan, almost challenging her to push back.

  “Fine,” she said, conveying anything but “fine” with her tone and glancing at her watch and walking away. “I’m due on watch.”

  “Ah, they grow up so fast,” Mitch said sarcastically as she stomped away.

  “They do when you give them an automatic rifle when they turn thirteen,” Dan replied as he stamped out his cigarette and turned towards the woods.

  ~

  After the next five days spent on high alert expecting some form of attack, nerves began to fray once again. Their soldiers were becoming exhausted again having to do double the hours as sentries.

  As Dan sat with Marie, who never missed an opportunity to point out his lack of daily washing, she poked playfully at the scraggy mess of beard where it was turning white. She was trying to lighten his mood, and although it wasn’t overtly working, at least she was distracting him from his brooding thoughts for a while.

  He was brooding, even more so when he saw that she was showing now. A noticeable bump swelled her belly, the physical manifestation of the very reason they started out on this fool’s errand at all.

  He had to make a decision.

  Marie seemed to sense this too, and giving up on her attempts to annoy him into smiling, she told him what he was thinking.

  “It’s been almost a week and nothing has happened,” she told him. “Go and find out where this place is, or let one of the others go, but we can’t just sit here waiting for something which might not happen.”

  He thought about that, knowing that she was right as she usually was but looking for a way to rationalise it to himself other than just being bored of waiting. The reason for stopping at the camp had been to recuperate, which they had been doing until someone had strolled up to their front door, but packing up everyone and leaving without an objective seemed too much like a step backwards. Leaning over to give her a kiss despite her squeals about the beard, he left to find the others.

  Thirty minutes later, he was leaning over a large-scale map with Mitch and Leah.

  “The ERV needs to be some distance away,” he said, as though Mitch needed a lesson in the skill which had been second nature for most of his life. Realising that the explanation was more for Leah, he nodded along with Dan.

  “ERV one, here,” Dan said, pinpointing a large bridge to the south. “Wait until daybreak on Monday then fall back to ERV two.”

  That gave him a minimum of three days to catch up with them if they had cause to leave without him.

  “ERV two, here,” he said, this time indicating a small settlement at least thirty miles to the south; it was far enough to not be in the same area but not so far that it couldn’t be reached on foot within the agreed forty-eight-hour time limit.

  “After that, we look after ourselves,” he finished lamely, breezing over the worst-case scenario.

  He straightened up, his back cracking in the process, and looked at the wider picture of the map. He had three days allocated to finding a better radio signal: one to travel southwest inland on the straightest and hopefully fastest roads, one to climb up high and get more of the message, and a day to travel back. Should he find the camp deserted in case the others had reason to leave, then he would turn around and head south to meet them at the bridge. If that failed, then they would fall back again and if that then failed, he had no idea what would become of any of them.

  The planning of emergency rendezvous points before the group split was commonplace, but never had they found themselves planning for so many people over such a huge scale. The discussions of failure brought more than the usual amount of trepidation on the eve of something big: it brought fear this time. Dan had thought through his options and requirements, deciding that he had to use something more substantial than the motorbikes they brought for scouting. He would need to take additional fuel, equipment and supplies if he was to be away for more than a night. That meant causing a huge stir in the camp by having to move the big truck out of the entrance and manoeuvre the most readily available of the smaller trucks they had.

  Despite his disappointment, getting the armoured truck out would take too long and be too disruptive so he reluctantly took the lightweight army Land Rover complete with its cracked windscreen where it had been perforated by bullets only hours after they had acquired it. He threw in his battered black rucksack which had barely left his side in well over a year, as well as two jerrycans of diesel, a sleeping bag and a whole slab of bullets. He liked to be sure.

  He was going alone: they all knew they couldn’t face the loss of two guns while they were still on high alert, but the question remained of whether Ash should accompany him or not. Three days without the dog would cause them both a fair amount of anxiety, but the pros and cons of leaving him with Leah were discussed. His early warning system could prove invaluable
should anyone else decide to pay them a visit, and while it would be beneficial to Dan, he knew that he was effective enough alone. As much as it tore at him, he took his dog for a walk and told him he would have to stay behind.

  “It’s not that I don’t need you or want you,” he told Ash as he stared back at him with no comprehension, “but you’re needed more here. I’ll be fine and it’ll only be for a few days.”

  Getting no answer back, not that he expected one, he ground out his cigarette on the ground and walked back to the others, planning to leave at the following dawn.

  DARK, DAMP AND DANGEROUS

  Eight miles out to sea, over a hundred feet below it, and almost five hundred miles away from Dan’s uncomfortable chat with his dog, four people sat quietly in their very slow-moving vehicle.

  The stress inside the truck was palpable, as much as the dank and foul air deep underground was slowly choking them. Without the small army of engineers and technicians required to keep the tunnel operating at peak efficiency as it had for over twenty years, the upkeep of such an astounding feat of engineering had been sorely neglected. The power to the air recirculation systems died long ago, and as a result, the quality of the air at the deepest section of the tunnel was desperately poor. They had decided, as logically as they could, to drive through the tunnel section the wrecked inbound train had used, hoping that would negate the chances of meeting any obstruction along the way which would force them to reverse for miles until they once again found daylight and fresh air.

  Obviously, the logic was sound insofar as when the crash first happened, but the risk of an obstacle which fell into place after was still on the cards. They all knew their reasoning was weak at best, but removing the chances of finding an outbound train completely blocking their route offered some small comfort.

  Not that comfort was a concept they could fathom at that point; the air was literally thick and had a quality unlike anything any of them had ever experienced. It was more of a taste than a smell, but it was undoubtedly unpleasant. Even through the closed windows with the air inside the car set to recirculate, their supply of oxygen was being slowly eroded. It started with the occasional cough, but now after almost an hour underground, it was becoming more of a problem. At their current rate of travel, they would need nearly another hour to get clear on the other side.

  In another hour, they would probably all be too hypoxic to operate a vehicle.

  In another hour, they would probably all be well on the way to being dead.

  RIDING SOLO

  As he always did, Dan left with as little fuss as possible. Leah saw him off with Marie and Neil at her side. Dan held her tightly, worried that the woman carrying his child was still looking exhausted to the point of appearing almost grey in colour.

  “What’s your plan again?” Leah asked with professional curiosity.

  “Drop about a hundred or so miles south–” he began.

  “Kilometres,” interrupted Leah, prompting a look of annoyance.

  “I’ll drop about two hundred kilometres south and after that I’ll cut away for higher ground,” he answered sarcastically.

  Nodding her agreement at his plan, Leah still wore a look of confusion as she tried to formulate the equation between the metric and imperial measurement systems.

  “One point six to one. Ks to miles,” Neil offered, seeing her struggling with the mathematics.

  Waving Dan off, Leah turned away to check her distance-string calculations on her map.

  Driving away on his own, he felt suddenly so sure that he was being intensely watched, so much so that he actually began to scan the higher ground for any telltale sign of a watcher with an optic catching the rising sunlight.

  He saw nothing and told himself that he was just being paranoid.

  “Two minutes in the car on your own and you’re already bloody talking to yourself!” He laughed, realising that the joke wasn’t entirely inaccurate. Or funny.

  Sacrificing caution for speed, he turned off towards the larger roads, slowing only to snap off the plastic barrier as he drove through a toll gate before accelerating as hard as the uncomfortable truck could manage. Eyes alert and scanning as far ahead as he could manage, he relished being free and moving again.

  He often felt too contained before, but this was different. Getting away from home and ranging out even a day away took the edge off his uneasiness but being totally nomadic was less enjoyable than he imagined. Perhaps, he thought, being unburdened with the responsibility for the others he would be happy just driving around with his dog and his guns.

  But then again, he pondered, he might just be as wild and unpredictable as some of the worst people they had met without the tether of a group to ground him. To keep him sane.

  Marie had told him once when they were talking about Rich overcoming the crippling post-traumatic stress disorder which left him so unable to integrate sometimes that his own situation was vastly different to most other people. Dan was broken before the world ended, and bizarrely the apocalypse fixed him, whereas it left most other people depressed and emotionally shattered.

  He was socially awkward at best, he knew that. But in truth, and in spite of all the disturbing events he had experienced since he found himself alone one morning, he had a purpose and a reason to stay alive. His purpose now was to put in at least a hundred and fifty miles, or two hundred and forty kilometres for the sake of argument, before he cut away from the abandoned toll roads; further than he had originally decided.

  Cruising along at a comfortably sedate fifty miles an hour, he guessed he was making as much progress as he could hope for. Any higher speed made such a skull-piercing noise from the all-terrain tyres that he found it impossible to concentrate on driving in a straight line. He passed only the occasional vehicle and avoided the small rest areas which were scattered intermittently every ten kilometres or so. Logic dictated that anyone suffering illness would stop their vehicles, and he knew - even if they didn’t at the time - that they would never rejoin the road. He carried on, unwilling to view the sad scenes of people dead in their cars.

  He cut away to the smaller roads after two hours, aiming the breezy truck towards a supermarket of such epic proportions that he couldn’t imagine finding anything comparable back home. Approaching slowly, he slid from the driver’s seat and stretched out his aching muscles. Restoring the ugly shotgun from the dash to the sheath on the back of his vest, he checked his weapons more out of obsessive compulsion over a technical need, and walked cautiously towards the large revolving glass doors. Giving an involuntary click of his fingers for Ash to fall in, he silently cursed himself for not remembering his shadow was left far behind with the others.

  Forcing the unpowered door to grind around sufficiently to allow him in, he saw that the sealed portion was full of dead leaves, rotten away into mulch. Taking a second to understand what that meant, he realised that someone must have been here the last time the leaves had fallen from the trees.

  Knowing that nobody had used this door for almost a year was both creepy and reassuring.

  Taking a knee and listening intently, he heard no response to the small noises he had made getting inside. Still, he hadn’t lived this long by being careless, he thought to himself. Creeping along aisle by aisle, he took note of where some bottles of water were for retrieval. The consumable food had rotted away long ago, leaving nothing but dried puddles and dirty marks where the insects had gorged themselves months ago. Finding the section he needed after passing large displays of refrigerators and garden furniture, he began to sift through the dust-covered books until he found what he wanted.

  A French–English dictionary. One of only two on the shelves and right now worth its weight in gold to him. Not wanting to hang around in an exposed area without backup, he stuffed the dictionary into his vest and swung back via the water aisle to grab himself a plastic-wrapped brick of natural mineral water.

  A quick scan outside showed no cause for concern so he threw his small ha
ul back into the truck and drove out. Surviving in an exposed environment, especially alone, was more luck than judgement sometimes and he felt lucky that nobody was there to take an interest in him.

  Deciding to push another hour inland, he settled back into the seat and eased the speedometer back up to almost sixty as he tried to ignore the tyre noise.

  Setting his sights on the far hills, he drove along, eyes still alert to any potential danger.

  ~

  Three hours’ drive behind him, Mitch stood watch. He had an uneasy feeling, unbeknown to him the exact same feeling Dan had as he drove away: he was absolutely sure he was being watched. Just as he convinced himself that he was imagining it, the sound of the single shot echoed around the valley.

  At the exact same time, the bullet hit him straight in the chest, throwing him off the top of the truck and bringing the ground rushing up to his face with sickening force.

  LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

  It was more of a physical reaction than a conscious thought, some deeply ingrained survival instinct which took over and made his limbs operate the vehicle without the need for cognitive intervention.

  Simon was drowsy. He could barely speak coherently, let alone realise that he was slowly suffocating and suffering the dangerous side effects of a loss of oxygen to his brain.

  Simon’s body, on the other hand, knew exactly what was going on. It couldn’t articulate the fact that the fumes that deep in the tunnel were making the air almost unbreathable, or that the mix of gases there was toxic, but it knew that it was going to die if it stayed there.

  It didn’t weigh up options or consider possible outcomes: it just reacted. It made his right foot press down harder on the throttle and push the speed up to a bone-shaking and painful speed. His body was unaware of the fact that two of the other occupants were complaining loudly about this, even less aware that the third passenger was unconscious; it just forced them all towards clean air and sunlight before they suffered worse than the fumes they were currently breathing in.