by Schow, Ryan
But then came the mad rush, not all the men fully engulfed in flames. A handful of them ran straight for her, murder in their eyes. She emptied the rest of her mag in those nearest her, but there were too many of them.
She started to back up, reaching for her personal Glock. Unleashing the 43, she opened fire. More than a handful of these guys took chase. Suddenly, she had no idea how many rounds she had left in the magazine. With the unexpected turn of events, she needed at least one bullet for herself, should the situation dictate it.
As she ran, the soles of her feet burned, and the chaffing in her thighs from walking was like razor burns smeared with sweat. The pain slowed her down, her aching feet doing her no favors.
Ultimately, fatigue is what did her in. It’s what ushered in her demise.
A hand reached out, grabbed her, latched on. But someone else was there, diving onto her. When the assailing body hit hers, she crashed down on her knees, quickly spun around only to be punched in the face.
There were two assailants—shadows against the backdrop of a cloudy, moonlight sky. Fists and elbows beat her face and body, all that rage channeled against her in a perfect vacuum of silence. To her, the noises of her death might as well be the soundtrack of deep space.
Behind these two psychos, three more men piled on her, ripping at her hair, punching her face and body.
This was how she would go out, how she would spend her last minutes on earth—torn apart by the hands and mouths of monsters, monsters who were now ripping at her the same way lions tore the flesh from gazelles.
But then the flurry slowed, and she saw heads snapping this way and that. Were bullets actually stopping these men?
Renewed, she started to fight her way out from underneath the pack.
Hudson and Kenley were suddenly there, pulling the dead or dying men off of her. Hudson stabbed those still alive in their armpits as Kenley watched. Before long, they’d be dead. Leighton sat up, tried to put herself back together. Closer to the garage, dozens of men were burning, their bodies writhing on the pavement, many of them on their backs or face down, in flames.
“Did you get them all?” Leighton asked, not sure she could see their moving mouths in the dark. Kenley suddenly turned, fired her rifle, then turned back around.
She knew the answer: there were still a few more out there.
“I’m out of ammo,” Leighton said.
Hudson helped her up. He then handed her a pistol and a spare mag that felt full. She felt her battered face, moved it around, then decided she was in bad shape, but not down or dead.
Let’s go, Kenley said to her.
She and Kenley walked back to the ladder-truck garage while Hudson returned to the burning Suburban.
With a few exceptions, most of the men had perished in the fire. Three patriots to a hundred scumbags, that was the number. With this ratio, the patriots could purge the entire country in no time flat, if only they dared to act.
Leighton wanted to feel bad for what happened, for what they did, but then she thought of Niles. He was the antidote to sorrow, the reason she felt no shame in what she did. Niles allowed her to pull that trigger. He was the reason she could do it again and again until the last of these monsters were nothing but roasted, smoking piles of char.
When Hudson met them in the driveway, he said, They’re all dead.
“Are you sure?” Leighton asked.
He nodded.
She turned and hugged the redhead, even though she didn’t even know her very well. Kenley was still the woman who had saved her, who had tried to save Niles, who had just lost her father.
Then she turned and hugged Hudson, who hugged her back. Being in his arms, she missed Niles, and she missed her father. She even missed her uncle Walker. His advice kept her alive throughout all of this. His weapons and tools had become her weapons and tools. In that way, he was a part of her, walking the journey with her.
“What next?” she asked.
Why don’t you two come back to the house with me, Kenley asked. I have beds, and…I don’t want to be alone.
“I need to get back to the dorms,” Leighton said. “They’re the other direction.”
You can’t go back tonight, Hudson said as he stood next to Kenley. She knew what he was doing. He was trying to make it easier to read their lips. She didn’t know him well, or Kenley, but she liked them both. The three of them survived something huge, something as big as the sins they committed. But she was also a murderer. They were all murderers.
“Not a murderer,” she heard Walker’s voice say in her head. “A survivor.”
A survivor.
Hudson is right, Kenley said. You can’t go back there alone. Especially not now.
She was right. Looking down the dark road back to NKU—the pitch-black highway that would take her through miles of forest—she flashed back to Crowbar Man, to Aaron, to the bodies in the overturned pickup truck, and it was then that she realized she wanted to go back to Jacob’s house. She could always leave in the morning.
“Okay,” she relented. “Thank you, Kenley.”
Will you two be okay without me? Hudson asked.
Leighton watched Kenley’s mouth drop open. You’re not serious, are you?
I live here, Hudson said.
“Don’t you live alone now?” Leighton asked.
He hesitated a moment, then said, Yeah. Now I do. I told you my girlfriend left me.
Please come with us, Kenley said. She touched his arm, stilling him. He glanced down at her hand, then looked back up at her and nodded.
“What do you have in your life that would make you leave us out here in the middle of the night anyway?” Leighton asked.
Nothing, I guess, Hudson said.
Good, let’s get going before I have a meltdown and you have to carry me home, Kenley said.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Leighton McDaniel
The three of them headed back to Melbourne. Whatever energy any of them had left, the walk home took the last of it.
The moon soon fell behind the clouds again, a slight wind carrying the high clouds through the dark sky. When the rain began to fall again, it was from a sky that was light enough and high enough for Leighton to put aside her worries about thunderstorms and tornadoes.
When they finally made it back to Kenley’s house, all she wanted to do was collapse on a bed and sleep forever. Ramira and Will were up waiting, though, both of them scared and incredibly sad.
The house has three beds, Kenley said.
I’ll take the couch, Hudson offered.
Kenley looked at him and said, I know that we don’t know each other, but I don’t want to be alone tonight. Will you sleep with me?
Hudson looked at Leighton who halfheartedly nodded. It was almost like he was seeking approval and needed Leighton to give it. She nodded back because she knew Kenley was hurting, and Hudson had just been left. This wasn’t a hookup, this was moral support. Leighton had also given them her permission because she wanted to be alone.
If she had someone more familiar there to comfort her, someone like her older sister, Marley, she would have wanted her in bed, too. Part of her wanted to be with someone, not to be reminded that she was alone. But Leighton was hurting and injured, and she needed time with her grief—time she couldn’t take for herself in the presence of others.
Kenley gave her some fresh clothes. She went to the bathroom, lit two candles, then peeled off her old clothes. The insides of her thighs hurt so badly, she started to cry. She held the candle down to them, saw how raw the skin looked from all that wet walking. She began to wash with clean toilet water, the chafed insides of her butt cheeks burning so badly it felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to them, and then lit a match. And her hoo-ha. Oh, boy, she thought as she looked down at her rashy privates.
“Now I know why you’re so angry,” she whispered.
As irritated as her privates had become in wet pants and panties, as dirty as she felt in her unchanged clothes, the b
urning in Leighton’s vahjeen could not compare to the pain radiating in her back and legs. She still had no idea how she survived the twister. Worse than that, however, were her feet. They were in the worst shape of all.
She pulled her bare feet up one at a time, frowning at the bottoms of them. Blisters had formed, burst, and then been rubbed so bad the skin had torn back. Some of them were bleeding while others had that bright pink look that meant a lot of pain was coming. She shook her head and tried not to cry with everything that had happened.
A survivor, her uncle Walker said in her head.
“Yes,” she repeated, “a survivor.”
Taking necessary stock of her body, she realized she couldn’t walk back to the dorms like this. Not tonight. But tomorrow? Maybe. No, definitely. She needed to go whether her body hurt or not because that’s where her father would look for her. With Niles’s house burned down, and the risk of retaliation from other factions of the Hayseed Rebellion a strong possibility, she could not be anywhere near Melbourne or Silver Grove. That was why going back to NKU made the most sense.
She put Kenley’s clothes on, felt better already, then returned to her bedroom where she found her pack sitting on a small desk. In the bed, curled up so small, was Buck. Her heart broke looking at the child. He must be so scared. She sat down next to him for a moment, realized she wouldn’t be getting that alone time after all. But maybe little Buck would be getting too much alone time which, for a child his age, was neither good nor healthy.
By candlelight, she reloaded her Glock, then set it on the nightstand beside her. As she was tucking the box of 9mm rounds back in the backpack, her fingers grazed the gun her uncle Walker had given her.
Pulling out the old piece, she turned it over in her hands, examining it by firelight. “What’s so special about you?” she asked aloud. Holding the revolver in her hands, she studied its angles, then checked the cylinder. She counted five rounds in the wheel.
There was something about this simple weapon, a power she didn’t feel in her Glock. Whoever was after it, whoever came to reclaim it—if they did—would not hesitate to take it from her. Walker said to shoot that person.
When she first read Walker’s instructions, she didn’t think she could kill a stranger. But she had since crossed that line, and she’d cross it again because that was the way of the new world, and she aimed to survive it at all costs.
She put the gun away and blew out the candle.
Crawling into bed next to Buck, she gently scooted him over, then curled her beaten body around his and pulled him close. He settled into her, the fit comforting, and then shut her eyes and wondered what tomorrow would bring.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Amell Benson
Amell returned to the dorms, saw the RA who had tried to stop him before looking like she was going to try again. He pulled out his gun and said, “Next time I see you, I’m going to ventilate your skull.”
The RA backed off, shaken and afraid.
When Amell got to Leighton’s dorm room, he slammed the door, fiddled with the lock enough to latch it shut, then lit a scented candle and started to tear the place apart.
When he saw the box with Leighton’s name on it, he felt himself smile. But it was empty, which turned that smile into a frown. A few minutes later, he found the letter Walker had written to Leighton. When he saw the reference to the gun, that frown turned upside down, and he felt like this was good news.
“I finally got you,” he muttered to himself.
But he didn’t have her, he didn’t have the gun, and he still didn’t have his life back. Nothing would be back to normal until that gun was in his possession and he was handing it back to Diesel.
Amell stood up, found more candles on an overhead shelf, lit them, then began going through the girls’ drawers.
When he found an underwear drawer, he stopped, almost like he wasn’t sure what to do. Long ago, he had a girlfriend. Sierra. No last name. She didn’t like him very much, even though he liked her just fine. The strangeness there always bothered him. It still bothered him. Lifting up the underwear and the bras, he wondered why Sierra had ever agreed to hook up with him. She was his old lady for a while until she wasn’t.
“What are you doing right this minute?” he wondered out loud.
Sierra was a healthy woman, a bigger woman, someone he didn’t want or need to change. But she had changed him. She changed him until he could no longer grow, and then they hit that wall. Examining the bra in his hands, he saw small cups, like a starter bra. He tossed it aside, kicked the drawer shut.
On the other side of the room, there was another dresser by the second bed. He opened the drawers, found the thick girl’s underwear, held up a c-cup bra, and fell still.
He was totally lost in his past now, thinking about Sierra, how there was a time when he cared about something, someone. He missed those days. But those days were now in the rearview mirror.
For a moment, when he sat down on Chandra’s bed, when he buried his face in her pillow, he smelled a woman’s smell, and he felt again. He liked that feeling, but there was a vulnerability to it he deemed somewhat incapacitating. Pulling back the blankets, he crawled into the girl’s bed, pushing his dirty boots through her clean sheets until he was tucked in proper. Then again, he smothered his face with the pillow, took a deep whiff of her, and felt that dark void in him close for the longest second.
In that small window of time, he felt like the Amell of the past. But all of a sudden—almost as if a light switch inside of him was just snapped off—the feminine scent meant nothing to him, the bra meant nothing to him, and his past with Sierra ceased to mean anything to him either.
“The only thing that matters is the gun,” he said into the empty room.
If he wanted a seat at the table, if he really wanted to right the wrongs that Walker McDaniel had heaped upon Diesel Daley and the Hayseed Rebellion, he would need both the gun and Leighton’s head. He could do that. He would do that.
Glancing around in the candlelit room, he set eyes on an opened Amazon box Chandra was using to hold her textbooks. It was like a poor person’s bookcase, even though the girl wasn’t poor, judging by the quality of her negligee. He dumped out the books, looked right at the box, and said, “I’m going to give you the best head. You just wait.”
And then he pulled the box over his head and lay down on the bed.
It was snug, but it fit.
You just wait…
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Colt McDaniel
Two weeks before the EMP… Colt looked up at the sound of knocking on the front door. The insistent, heavy-handed pounding sounded like a cop’s knock. In the kitchen, Colt looked at Faith and said, “Are you expecting someone?”
She glanced up from the stove. “No, not today.”
When he opened the door, he saw Sheriff Lance Garrity standing there. “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”
“Nothing,” he said, sort of choked up. “Just take this. It’s from your brother.”
Surprised, Colt took the box and thanked the man.
“Everything else okay?”
“No, Colt. Everything else is not okay. Not unless you’re living under a rock. Are you living under a rock?”
“Not today,” he said with a frown.
“Then you know what’s going on, how it is for us out there.”
“I suppose I do.”
Without another word, the lawman left. Colt lugged the box inside, set it down. The sight of his brother’s cursive handwriting filled him with sadness.
Faith was suddenly at his side, forty-five years old and just as beautiful as the day he met her. But now her face was lined with worry, the same as it had been for the last two years as the nation began its descent into chaos.
“Is that Walker’s writing?” Faith asked.
Colt slowly nodded. She put her hand on his back, soothing him, reassuring him.
“You should open it,” she said.
&
nbsp; He opened the large box. Inside he found a sniper rifle, a smaller box wrapped in packing tape, and a sealed envelope with his name on it. He opened the letter and read it.
The note was short, to the point.
Colt,
They’re coming for you. It’s only a matter of time. The gold is yours if you can protect it. It’s half the key to keeping the president alive and this country from completely falling to ruin. Don’t be you, not this version of you. Be worse. Be the old you. The nation doesn’t just need this from you, it will demand it soon enough.
Your brother, Walker
“Oh, no,” he said, his face going deathly pale. Fear mixed with loss and regret, not just for the life that he and his brother never had, but for the anxiety now gathering inside of him.
“What’s wrong?” Faith asked. “Other than all of this?”
“There’s a storm coming,” Colt turned and said to her, his face ashen, never more serious. “It’s coming for all of us.”
END OF BOOK 1
Join Colt and Faith in the next thrilling installment, These Times of Revolution.
A Look Ahead: These Times Of Retribution
Before the EMP hits, before a crushing storm arrives, a package from Colt McDaniel’s brother is hand-delivered to his house, upending his entire world. What Colt discovers inside the box is an item that shakes him to his core. A tyrant from his past is coming, and all hell is coming with him.
More alarming to Colt than the item in the box is his brother's cryptic message: You need to be who you were, who I was, not who you are now. His brother was a sullied man. Colt once was as well. He managed to break free of his past, however, vowing never to return to that side of himself. But then the power went out, people began to panic, and society seemed to crumble overnight.
