“I would hunt him down and kill him if I thought it was worth it,” Eric said, as he shook the water off of him and got dressed. “But he’ll probably get what he deserves without my help.”
“Do you think he went to Texas?” Jonathan asked. “We could go there and tell Reyes. They may not let him in if they know what he did.”
“It’s too late for that,” Keith said. “He’s had most of the day to get there depending on what time he did this. He’s probably already been stopped by the C.R.I. guys and there’s no telling what he told them. He wants into that refugee center and they’ll no doubt welcome him. We’ll be the bad guys if we go looking for him now.”
“Well that sucks! He shouldn’t be able to get away with what he did. What in the hell are we going to do now? We have no sailboat, so that completely screws up our plans and now we’re just going to be stuck hiding out in the swamp, I guess.”
“We’re not stuck,” Eric said, “just delayed. I’ll know more tomorrow after I check some more things down there, but I’m fairly certain Dreamtime can be re-floated. It’ll be a lot of hard work, but she’s still our best option.”
“But what about all our supplies in there and all our other gear and stuff? It’s all ruined. Man, this sucks! I wish I could shoot that bastard myself! What a dickhead!”
* * *
“I am so sorry, Eric,” Shauna said, when she saw the sunken schooner first-hand the next morning.
Eric, Keith and Jonathan had returned to the Miss Anita that afternoon just as the sun was setting. Everyone was stunned of course, but none of them as much as Shauna and Andrew.
“It’s not your fault he snapped,” Eric said. “I guess we should have all seen it coming, but honestly, I didn’t think he would do anything but keep complaining.”
“I feel like it’s my fault because I married him in the first place. But he wasn’t like this before, Eric. I had no idea he could do something like this.”
“Of course you didn’t. How could you? Look, I know why you married him, and I’m sure everything would have been fine if life had gone on the way it did back then. No one knows how they’re going to react to circumstances like this until they find themselves facing them. I’ve seen trained soldiers snap too—do all kinds of crazy stuff—and most of the time no one saw it coming. So, don’t blame yourself. You did everything you could to try and get him through it, but he just couldn’t handle it.”
“Andrew is blaming himself too. You heard him. He thinks this is all his fault because he stood up to his dad and refused to go to Texas with him. I don’t know how we’ll ever get him to understand it wasn’t because of him… or how he’ll react if he finds out about us. I don’t know which is worse, but I know he’s never going to understand.”
“He doesn’t need to find out, Shauna, not now anyway.”
“What do you think will happen to Daniel if he made it to Texas?”
“I don’t know, but I suspect he’s going to realize how much better off he was with us, even if he didn’t like the way we were doing things. If I had to guess, he’ll end up with a crowd of people who had no options or resources like he did, and like them, he’ll have to cope with crappy food, substandard accommodations and more or less a complete loss of freedom. If he thought he was hating life here, he hasn’t seen anything yet. But he brought it on himself, so I don’t feel sorry for him. I’m just glad he cleared out of here before I found this, because what I probably would have done if he hadn’t would be even harder to explain to Andrew.”
“I’m glad too, Eric, because I couldn’t live with that either. I’ve been terrified ever since you showed up at your dad’s place that you two were going to get into it and Daniel was going to get hurt. At least I don’t have to worry about that now.”
“Nope, we’ve got enough to worry about with the mess he left us.”
“Are you sure we can get that boat out of there, Eric? It looks pretty hopeless to me.”
Megan and Vicky had said the same, but like Eric, Bart knew it could be done as long as the hull was still intact. Bart’s expertise from all his years of owning and running a boatyard was going to come in handy, as was Eric’s diving background. They had the Miss Anita with her powerful engine and generators, and with half the parish abandoned, Keith figured they could scrounge up whatever else they needed as soon as he changed those flat tires so they could go looking.
“The first thing I’m going to do is thoroughly check the hull inside and out, at least to the extent that I can by feel. Then, I’ll close all those seacocks and replace the cut hoses. Getting hose clamps on and off without being able to see jack shit is probably going to take some time, but I’ll get it done. After that, it’ll just be a matter of setting up a compressor and finding enough inner tubes or inflatable whatever to pack in there and displace some of that water. That will be the slow part, and it’s going to take a lot of positive buoyancy to raise her high enough so that we can start pumping, but other than the hard work and the time involved, it’s a relatively straightforward process. We need to get on it though, because we don’t know how much time we’ve got. There’s no telling what Daniel may have told them in Texas if he thought it would lead to getting you and Andrew over there with him.”
“Even if we get it floating before they show up, it’s going to take an awful lot of cleaning to make that boat habitable after it’s been sitting in that muddy water. What if we can’t get it ready in time, Eric? Daniel may have sabotaged our plans after all.”
“Don’t think like that, Shauna. We’ll take it one step at a time, that’s what we always do. If those contractors show up and try to stop us, then we’ll deal with it—fight if we have to—or if we have the boat afloat, move it down to that lake to complete our preparations. But the most important thing is that we’re all here and we still have resources to work with. We’re in this together Shauna, like never before.”
* * *
Thank you for reading Feral Nation - Sabotage. I hope you enjoyed the story! Don’t miss the action that follows in Book Eight: Feral Nation - Defiance, available to preorder now on Amazon at this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0844NQHKT/
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More by Scott B. Williams
THE FOLLOWING LINKS WILL take you to the Amazon Kindle versions of my most popular books that are available now. New books are coming all the time so stay up to date by signing up for my book alerts via my New Release Updates
Feral Nation Series
Feral Nation - Infiltration (Book 1)
Feral Nation - Insurrection (Book 2)
Feral Nation - Tribulation (Book 3)
Feral Nation - The Divide (Book 4)
Feral Nation - Perseverance (Book 5)
Feral Nation - Convergence (Book 6)
Feral Nation - Sabotage (Book 7)
Feral Nation - Defiance (Book 8)
The Pulse Series:
The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid (Book 1)
Refuge After the Collapse (Book 2)
Voyage After the Collapse (Book 3)
Landfall: Islands in the Aftermath (Book 4)
Horizons Beyond the Darkness (Book 5)
The Darkness After Series:
Enter the Darkness (Serie
s Prequel)
The Darkness After (Book 1)
Into the River Lands (Book 2)
The Forge of Darkness (Book 3)
The Savage Darkness (Book 4)
Apocalypse Series:
Sailing the Apocalypse: A Misadventure at Sea
Nonfiction:
On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean
Bug Out: The Complete Plan for Escaping a Catastrophic Disaster Before It’s Too Late
About the Author
SCOTT B. WILLIAMS HAS been writing about his adventures for more than twenty-five years. His published work includes dozens of magazine articles and twenty-five books, with more projects currently underway.
His interest in backpacking, sea kayaking and sailing small boats to remote places led him to pursue the wilderness survival skills that he has written about in his popular survival nonfiction books and travel narratives such as On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean, an account of a two-year solo kayaking expedition he undertook at age 25.
With the release of The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid in 2012, Scott moved into writing fiction full time. His post-apocalyptic and action & adventure stories draw heavily on his personal wilderness and ocean experiences to create believable scenarios often set in dire circumstances. To learn more about his upcoming books or to contact Scott, visit his website: www.scottbwilliams.com
Dedication
DEDICATED TO ARTIE VAUGHAN, sailor, adventurer and faithful friend
Feral Nation Series (Book 7): Feral Nation [Sabotage] Page 17
