Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5

by Isherwood, E. E.

  “You’re right. I won’t let this distraction happen again.”

  She took his hand and looked into his eyes with empathy. “Ted, I sincerely hope it does happen again. Hell, we need to allow the pain in. Both of us. But not yet. This is terrible to behold, no doubt about it. However, right now, I need you to help me get back to where I can do some good.”

  “I’m fine. Really. I think seeing this woman reminded me of my sister. She’s gone.”

  “Maybe—”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ve come to terms with it. Everybody is dead on the East Coast.”

  “Not everyone,” she reminded him. “Your niece made it.”

  “That’s true,” he said with renewed enthusiasm.

  Emily seemed to sense the change in mood. She spun around in her new outfit. “So, you got what you wanted. I’ve changed my clothes. Can we go now?”

  He now noticed she’d taken out her earrings and removed a thin bracelet. However, she’d transferred a small American flag pin from her other blouse.

  “I thought you’d never ask.” He smiled.

  Since most everything was already loaded, they locked up his apartment door and then went down to the garage again. His Jeep started easily, and he pulled through the exit of the garage, happy there wasn’t a gate or anything requiring a human to open it for them.

  He centered his aviator glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Okay, ma’am. My plan is to get you to a radio, so I want to take you to the nearest Air Force installation. Well, Andrews is the closest, but we aren’t going back there. We’ll head north, to Pennsylvania. I’ve been to an Air National Guard post up there. I’m sure they’ll have what we need.”

  Emily turned. At first, he imagined her dressed for a pleasant morning drive in the country. They even had the sandwiches for a picnic lunch. However, they weren’t on a date, so he fought to dispel that illusion.

  “Ted, are you sure we can’t go south? That will put us closer to your niece.”

  “No, ma’am, though I appreciate the offer.” As an uncle, he wanted to go down there straight away and make good on his promise to Rebecca. However, as a warrior, he knew that was foolish. “The JFK is going to make a hell of a target for the enemy. They aren’t going to let it go, and the carrier isn’t going to go out quietly. Assuming they’re still in port, which I very much doubt, they certainly won’t let us on board. They’d probably shoot first and never ask questions; that’s what I’d do if I were in charge down there.”

  “I might think twice about promoting you,” she said with mock fear.

  “What I mean is you and I have a duty to get you safely to the nearest radio. Places like DC, Newport News, and Baltimore are all going to be hotspots for the enemy. If we stay on the backroads and keep our profile low, we can avoid detection until the cavalry arrives.”

  “When will that be?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “But they’ll get here sooner if we can talk to them. After that, assuming you’re in good hands, I’ll go for my niece.”

  Poor Sisters Convent, Oakville, MO

  Tabby patted Donovan on the back as he slept. “Time to wake up.”

  “Mom, give me a few more minutes, all right? Dad gives me more, all the time.” The boy rolled over and jammed his face in the pillow, but then slowly lifted it back up. His eyes grew wide when he saw it was Tabby standing over him. “What did I just say?”

  “Nothing,” she said while brushing it off. Audrey had thought she was her mom after the girl had passed out in the mine yesterday. Being mistaken for their parents was a weird phenomenon that made her feel important and helpless at the same time.

  “Come on, guys,” she said louder. “We have to get going.”

  Peter and Audrey sat up together. “What’s the hurry?” Peter asked.

  “I want to get on the road and catch up to the police. They must be close because the cordon can’t be much bigger than the city of St. Louis. They could have never evacuated everyone.”

  She hoped to find someone in the big city. Someone who knew what the heck was going on, and, she was sorry to admit, who didn’t blame the whole thing on God.

  Sister Rose was a sweetheart for giving them a place to stay, and she was impressed with her wolf-dog, but Tabby wasn’t ready to stop driving.

  “I can offer you whatever food I have,” Sister Rose remarked as Tabby and the teens put on shoes and gathered their weapons.

  “I could eat!” Peter blabbed.

  “No!” Tabby replied, feeling a little bit like a parent again. “We’ll find something when we leave, okay? We have to get going.”

  Tabby pulled out the pistol she’d kept stuffed in her tight waistband. “Sister, will you take this gun? There could be bad people out there. You should be able to defend yourself. It’s really easy—”

  The nun put her hands out. “No. Please, I’m not interested in guns.”

  Peter tapped the tube of his shotgun. “Sister, you should listen to her. She’s pretty smart. You may not need it for people, but you might for the…” He glanced uncertainly at Deogee, her dog. “Wildlife.”

  “God will care for me. Or he will not. A gun will not change my fate.”

  Tabby didn’t think that was true, but she wasn’t interested in arguing. It was better for her to keep the gun, anyway.

  As Tabby gathered her stuff, she tried to figure out why she was so hot to get away from the religious woman. Was it because of what she’d said about missing the boat on God’s calling? Were she and the kids left in God’s dust? Or did it have more to do with the idea a supreme being could allow the murderous disaster to happen in the first place?

  Tabby believed God existed, but her parents never made her go to church, so it didn’t occur to her to pray for guidance.

  “Thank you for everything, Sister. You saved our sanity last night.” She looked at the kids. The two boys poked at each other like they were play fighting. “You saved my sanity, anyway,” she said in a much quieter voice.

  “You do have your hands full,” Rose replied. “If you ever come back, please stay here. Deogee and I could use the company. We may be in for a long period of silence.”

  The wolf stopped and looked over when it heard its name.

  “Sheesh, I hope not,” Tabby replied. “I couldn’t survive a day without chatting with someone.”

  Sister Rose became calm. “You would be surprised what you can do. I was a lot like you before I came to this place, at least in regard to the pressures of life, but I found solace and peace. I once spent a year of complete silence here.”

  “Didn’t that drive you insane?” Audrey squealed. “I couldn’t do that, like, for a single day.”

  Tabby was more impressed. “I couldn’t do that, either. Why did you finally give it up? What changed?”

  Rose seemed to chew on a response. “I gave it up when I saw the four of you.”

  Peter whistled.

  “Wow. I’m honored. We all are.” Tabby pointed to the teens, mostly because of the guilt she experienced for looking down on the woman. She was nothing if not filled with resolution. It was a skill Tabby needed to develop.

  Rose held up her hand. “We all have our calling before God, and he does talk to us, but sometimes you have to know when he wants you to do something helpful for other people without his spelling it out. When you are out there with your shotguns and other implements of death, don’t forget that.”

  Tabby saw that as her cue to leave. She took a moment to pet the dog, receiving gobs of drool for the effort. “Good pup,” she remarked.

  “All right, people. The tour is leaving. Next stop, downtown St. Louis, Missouri.”

  She didn’t tell them she had no intention of stopping if things didn’t get better. The cordon was out there, possibly growing larger every second they delayed. If she had to drive all the way to Canada to find her parents, she would.

  The kids ran to the car like they were going to miss it.

  She and Si
ster Rose hugged. “Good luck to you, Sister.”

  “And to you. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “I will.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Poor Sisters Convent, Oakville, MO

  Sister Rose watched the friendly young people drive away, and she had mixed feelings about letting them go. They all carried guns for one thing, which made her uneasy. But they were all so young. She believed it might have been irresponsible to let them go off on their own like they did.

  “Come on, Deogee, let’s go for a walk.” Walking helped her think.

  She wasn’t ready to jump in a car and leave her home, nor did she have the ability to force them to stay with her. It would have led to conflict, which was an emotional state she’d worked for over a year to unlearn. Plus, Tabby had some hang-up about blaming everything on a gas attack. She’d tried to talk her out of that notion, but it was a lot like speaking to a stone wall.

  “You lead,” she said to the dog.

  It was a relief to talk again and leaving the convent without being told by Abbess Mary Francis was similarly liberating.

  The gray wolf dog paced in front of her as she left the yard and walked into the street, though the anxious female dog took a brief detour to revisit her dead master. The fallen clothes had blown into some bushes next to the sidewalk, making it difficult for the big girl to settle on one place to sniff, besides the yellow running shoes, which hadn’t moved.

  “Come on, pup.”

  They both moved away from the dead person. Rose was glad to let the dog search around but was also relieved it chose to be with her at all. Seeing Deogee around her old master made her worry she was about to be abandoned again. It would be a lot worse now that she’d sent those kids away. However, the dog continued to pace alongside her, even as they rounded a corner and went into a subdivision of new homes.

  She’d barely gotten to look at the new structures go up, despite living across the street from the development. Her cloistered lifestyle gave her little time to stare out the window and reflect, which was how the new homes sprung up almost without her knowing about them.

  Deogee’s nails clicked on the hot pavement as they walked in the middle of the street. The smell of fresh lawns filled the air. Bird song and cricket chirps were the only sounds; there were none of the unnatural noises of life, like cars, garage doors, or lawnmowers.

  The residential roadway went a little uphill. The trees in front of the homes were saplings, at best, which allowed her to see all the way to the end of the street a quarter of a mile away. As she expected, there were no people anywhere in sight.

  “Hello?” she called out in a weak holler. “Is anyone here?”

  No one answered. In fact, it seemed to get quieter.

  “Hello!” she yelled in a stronger voice.

  Deogee whined. Her ears were straight up, like she’d heard something up ahead.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  The furry ears seemed to search the air like little satellite dishes. When they locked on, she barked.

  “What—” Rose began.

  Another bark came from up ahead.

  She hesitated, knowing another dog could lead to problems, but the gray wolf seemed intent on finding it. She’d gotten ahead of Rose and made it known she wanted her to follow. The dog looked over its shoulders, walked a few paces, then glanced back again.

  Rose sighed. “All right, let’s go look.”

  They didn’t have to go more than a hundred yards. A black lab was inside the front window of a house a short way up the street. While they stood on the driveway, the lab barked endlessly from the front room. It constantly fought the drapes; they always wanted to hide the dog.

  Rose rang the doorbell out of courtesy, though that drove the lab mad. The barking got a lot worse, making her wonder if she was doing the right thing by getting involved.

  “She probably needs to be let outside,” she remarked.

  “They all do,” she thought. That made her nervous. How many dogs were on this street? There were at least twenty houses. Each one could have a pet.

  After jiggling the front door handle, she found it unlocked.

  That made the lab go nuts inside, like she was about to invade its space, but it would be cruel to leave the dog locked up. Something had to be done.

  She pushed the front door open, which released the black lab from its home. It wagged its tail furiously at her ankles, then it sniffed Deogee for a tense couple of seconds. Before Rose could reach it and give a scratch, the dog hopped off the front porch and did its business in the grass.

  “We’re here to rescue you, girl” she said, wondering if being with multiple dogs was going to be a blessing or a curse.

  Leesburg, VA

  “This is where you said the government bunker is located,” Ted remarked as they passed the sign welcoming them to Leesburg. “Do you want to pop in and check it out?”

  Emily thought about it for almost a minute.

  “Emily?” he prodded.

  “No, I don’t believe we should. I’ve been thinking about what you said. If there’s an unseen enemy out there, and if they drove into D.C. and were surveilling the White House, they will almost certainly have eyes on the one place all the politicians would go after a disaster. We should go through town while staying far away from any Best Buys.”

  “I’ll do my best, but I don’t know where the stores are located.”

  “Me either,” she admitted.

  “If someone’s there,” he added after some reflection, “we don’t want to give them away. If I didn’t know about it, maybe the bad guys don’t know about it, either. It would suck if we brought attention to people hiding there.”

  “Good call. I’m behind you one hundred percent. Let’s keep going.”

  Ted believed she’d made the right decision. It was too risky to poke around in places where they couldn’t be certain there would be friendlies. The National Guard base in Harrisburg was a hundred miles away up Hwy 15; an easy morning drive. It was an obscure location with no military significance. If they had any hope of finding a working radio without being discovered, it would be there.

  An hour into their drive, they passed a sign for the Gettysburg National Battlefield. “I guess that place is going to be forgotten,” he said with regret. “Without Americans around to remember it, who will care what happened there?”

  She spoke with grim firmness. “There will be Americans there again. This fight is far from over.”

  He glanced at Emily, proud of her for taking that stance. “I know, ma’am. I was thinking in the short term. The place should be filled with little kids learning about the big battles and bigger wars for their freedom. The visitor center movie might be playing right now, explaining things to an empty theatre.”

  He kept driving, realizing how big his part in this really was. His role in helping the vice president could one day be as talked about as General Lee forcing his men across those fields into murderous fire on the other side. It proved the point that even brilliant generals had bad days.

  Ted couldn’t afford this to be his bad day.

  “Think,” he willed himself.

  Emily turned on the radio and went through the dial. It was the same story as yesterday: there was only one station still playing music. All the others were either gone, or they played ‘station offline’ automated messages.

  “Why is this one still on?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe they’re the only one who thought to put a looped backup tape into the rotation, in case of an emergency like this.” He considered how he might have handled it. “We should listen for repeats.”

  “Why?” Emily asked.

  He did a double-take over in her direction. “I don’t know. I guess it would give us something to do, rather than worry about the fires, wrecks, and strange soldiers running around.”

  “Oh, right.” She smiled.

  They listened to the radio for many miles, sometimes s
uffering through terrible songs. As they got closer to Harrisburg, he expected the station to fade away like all FM stations eventually do when you get far enough from their transmitters, but it sounded as strong as it did back in DC.

  The dial setting was the same as it was back home.

  “100.0 on the FM dial,” he remarked.

  Amarillo, TX

  Brent Whitman waved the men down the steps. “Put that stuff in Barney’s cell. We’ll use that as the storage place for all the cans of food. Toby’s cell will be for water only.”

  He thought they’d put together a pretty good plan in a short period of time. Yesterday, after most of the prison residents fled to points unknown, six of the men had volunteered to stay with Brent in the lower level of the prison. Today, they focused on gathering supplies from the kitchen and infirmary. The only key he didn’t give them was for the weapons locker inside the upstairs security booth.

  “We’ll keep the first aid supplies in the lower guard shack,” he suggested.

  The booth already had a small cabinet designed for medical supplies, such as bandages and aspirin, so it seemed to make sense.

  “What, you don’t trust us with the good stuff?” Paul, the gas thief, stood at the entrance to the cage with the water in it but pointed to the medical supplies in Brent’s arms.

  “I trust you,” Brent laughed, “but tell me where you would go to fence this stuff?”

  Paul was the shaggy-haired man who’d become the liaison for the remaining prisoners. He and Brent had always gotten along, and joked back and forth, but now Paul’s jokes had an edge to them. It was probably because no one had a clue about what had killed everyone on the upper levels, or in the nearby towns. “I’m just kidding with you, Mr. Whitman.”

  “Please, call me Brent.” He was secretly relieved. There was no reason to suspect the men would jump him, but any rise in tension could lead to that end. It was risky to even joke with them. “We’re all equal down here.”

  “Is that why you have the fire stick?” Paul said, pointing to the gun on Brent’s hip. The guy also liked to think of himself as a Native American. When he first came in, the man was deeply tanned, with unruly hair. He looked a little wild, like a native time forgot. However, as the months of his sentence wore on, he’d become a pasty white man, like the rest of them. Even the bird tattoos on his arms lost some of their outdoorsy charm.