The long, upward slant on Bank Street gave him an advance peek of what was in front of him. More cars were parked in the middle of the street. A few more pedestrians—possibly looters. But beyond that, an even greater threat lurked. A group of military men had blocked off the roads.
He could see no other working vehicles on the road, and it seemed unlikely that they’d let him and his family pass. But turning back wasn’t an option. He could tell from a few blocks away that he’d already caught their attention.
Barking orders at others, an officer waved him to the side, gestured for him to roll down his window. Hatfield did so, then asked him, “What seems to be the problem?”
Strong jawed and blessed with an intimidating glare, the Major—Hatfield knew by the insignia on his uniform—leaned forward and spoke. “I’m afraid we’re going to need to confiscate your car, sir. By order of the governor.”
Knowing this would be death for his family, Hatfield had no reply.
“Did you hear me, sir?”
“Why do you need our car?”
“Sir, we don’t have to argue over this. We have to—”
Gunshots clapped through the air, interrupting the standoff and sending everybody’s attention to the area behind the major. Other troops drew their weapons, looking for the source of the shots.
“Wait here!” the major commanded, then raced away toward the danger, screaming out orders as more shots, explosions, and screams echoed through the night.
All was silent and tense in the Hummer. Hatfield watched the combat unfold. In the distance, a gang of looters took shelter behind a fallen truck while the troops scrambled in opposition.
He dragged his gaze away just long enough to look at the stretch of road ahead. There were barricades in place, but nothing that could stop the Hummer. His wife’s face twitched in terror. A glance into the rearview mirror showed a similar look on Justin and Tami’s faces.
As the combat went on, the road ahead tempted him. There was a danger to disobeying the major’s command but a bigger danger to allowing his family to fall under occupation. If his father were around, there’d be no question which path he would recommend. He could almost feel his presence easing his foot off the brakes and onto the accelerator.
Gunning the pedal and barreling ahead, Hatfield could feel he was crossing into an important place. It calmed him to know he wasn’t doing it alone. “Your family matters more than anything else,” a familiar voice echoed as the Hummer sprang past the combat. “Anybody else hear that?” he asked the others.
“Hear what?” Justin asked.
“Never mind.”
Nathan Swain watched the Humvee crash through the barriers from a distance, binoculars to his eyes, a smirk falling across his chubby face. “Nice.” Something about watching the world crumble into chaos was amusing to him.
It may have been his history of capitalizing on the misfortunes of others. He’d gotten his start in pediatric medicine, taking advantage of a doctor friend who’d discovered a new treatment for many childhood diseases. By pretending to have pioneered the idea himself, Swain made a fortune. Sure, he lost a friend in the process, but who doesn’t lose friends along the way to the top? he reasoned.
His most recent break coming from someone less fortunate took place hours after the crazy outage that seemed to be rocking the city. A family mortgaging a home from him was already struggling to keep up with payments, so he thought of an ideal way to exact re-payment: he took back the home. Knowing the family’s home had been equipped for survival after an extreme emergency, he took up residence there. There was more he needed to learn about running the place, but he’d pick all that up in time. For the moment, all was well. He was safe, warm, and well-fed.
A rustle in the shrubs near the porch grabbed his attention. A group of guys, young ones, dressed like thugs, their faces hungry and sharp with menace. Nathan scrambled, looking for the pistol the Nickerson family had stashed somewhere.
Seconds later, the shatter of glass echoed, sending the portly little man scurrying through the hallway and into the basement. The good news was he found a rifle down there. The bad news was he had no idea how to use it. Even something as simple as cocking it was difficult. After two attempts, the gun tumbled out of his grip.
When it clanked to the floor, he scooped it back up and held it up hip-high. There was no time to learn to shoot, he figured. The best he could do was look like he knew what he was doing. Glancing into the full-length mirror across the basement, he practiced, knowing time was running out.
There was creeping going on upstairs, failed attempts to stifle laughter and move about silently. Nathan found himself breathing heavy and hard, his pulse racing. In a strange way, he loved it. Having spent his life in real estate, investing and running properties, he’d always waited for this kind of danger and intrigue.
But still, he wasn’t ready for the screams that followed. Four or five voices called out in horror at the same time. Nathan’s eyes grew big.
Soon the voices were crying for help, begging. He’d never heard agony like that before—strange when coming from a group that seemed so threatening minutes earlier. With the gun at his hip, he took cautious and quiet steps out of the basement. “Hello?” he asked, voice just above a whisper.
“Help, please!” they cried.
At the top of the steps, he looked to the living room and saw a surprise waiting for him. Five gangbangers were ensnared in a net as they hung eight feet off the ground. Nathan chuckled. “Man, this place is full of awesome surprises!”
With bulging eyes, every gangbanger looked at him, their faces getting more wrinkled with worry the closer he got. “Please! Don’t shoot!”
Nathan got a kick out of this. He’d forgotten he was holding the gun. It was good to get a reminder. “Okay, fellas. I’m going to ask you a really stupid question. And if you don’t give me a good answer, you’re done.”
“Please! Don’t!”
“Shut up!” he yelled. “The question is this: What are you guys doing in here?”
“Look, I’ll be honest with you, man. We’re desperate! We need food, water. Everything!”
Nathan shrugged. “Well, at least you’re honest. The only problem is, you’re stupid. You can’t just run into somebody’s house like this and assume they don’t have some kind of protection.”
“Sorry.”
He gave his head a slow shake. “That won’t cut it.” He circled the gang, moving in for a closer look. Something about them fascinated them. A gang, a real-life gang! The kind he’d seen in movies and read about in newspapers. “What do you guys have on you?”
“What do you mean?” one of them asked.
“You know! Weapons! What do you have?”
“We got some guns, a few knives.”
Nathan stepped closer, patted a few of them down with the butt of the rifle. The first few pockets he checked were empty. When he finally heard the thud of metal, he jabbed his hand into the net and fished a revolver out of one of their pockets.
He whistled, long and low, gazing at it. Just like the movies, he thought to himself. He gave the barrel a spin and started to do a Clint Eastwood, but couldn’t remember how the line went. “Is this your lucky day, punk—no, that’s not right.”
Tossing the gun onto the couch, he moved on with his search, digging through everybody’s pocket at least once.
The couch wound up with five guns and two knives on it. “Is that all you guys got?”
“That’s it, I swear!” one of them answered. He was a slender-faced kid, possibly the gang’s leader.
Nathan stood there with the rifle trained. He liked seeing them squirm and knowing how scared they were. So he took his time pondering his next move. After circling them for another minute or two, he said, “Okay, I’m going to let you guys free. But only on one condition—and it’s totally non-negotiable: you have to let me into your gang.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me. Actually, let me rep
hrase that. You have to let me run your gang. That means you listen to me and nobody else at all times. And if you think about ambushing me, you’d be re-think that. You see, when you came up the house, your faces—every one of them—were being recorded. And I have just the connections I need to send the National Guard after you. And if you don’t know what happens to people who are considered a threat under martial law, try me.”
Not a peep from the gangbangers.
“But on the other hand, you listen to me, you let me give you guys the structure and leadership you need, and we’ll turn this little amateur outfit into an army that even the National Guard can’t stop. You all with me?”
He got a round of enthusiastic howls in reply.
It took a while for him to find the switch that released the guys from the net, but once down, they were cooperative, having been seduced by Nathan’s promises of leadership and growth.
But most of all, they’d been persuaded by his BS. The only truth behind the threat he’d made was that the Nickersons had installed a camera system outside the home, capturing the gangbangers faces on video—or they would have had the system been working. Everything after that was a fabrication. He had no connection to the National Guard, and he had no idea what would or could happen to them under martial law.
None of this mattered to Nathan. As a good businessman, he knew the power of a good bluff.
The rest of the ride from the shop was a little more peaceful. The chaos of gunshots, fires, and irate crowds faded the farther they drove away. But with the streets clogged with abandoned cars, any attempt to get away would be complicated. He grunted, “Looks like we’re going to have to go back through downtown. Make sure you brace yourselves. Things may get kind of—”
A glance to his side and into the rearview mirror told him nobody was listening. All sound asleep. The image brought a much-needed smile to his face. It didn’t seem to make sense that anybody could—or would—sleep with so much horror unfolding around them. But then he remembered something his father told him about drills done to new soldiers to help them maintain stamina in important times. He talked about how he’d heard stories of combatants in World War One falling asleep as tanks rolled over their trenches. “When the body craves something, it craves it,” he said.
Just about the only time he recalled his dad sharing a personal story was the time he talked about his dad making him stay up to clean the bathroom after writing a dirty word on the wall. “That night, my body craved sleep. All because it craved vandalism that day.”
He remembered the way they’d laughed together when he shared that story. Maybe their only shared laugh. It was fun to remember it. Sometimes he needed to remind himself that there were good times between the two of them. Not many of them, not enough. But some.
Something thudded against the back window, loudly enough to yank everybody awake and fill the car with screams. “What’s happening!” Jess yelled as a crowd scrambled after them.
“Downtown, honey,” he answered. “That’s what’s happening.”
He sped through the narrow streets, easily outgunning the crowd, but soon that wouldn’t be an option. Up ahead, less than a block away, another street clogged with abandoned cars forced him to find a detour.
He skidded left, finding a burning mess in the middle of the street—large enough that he didn’t risk driving through it. No choice but to screech to a stop, then try the other way.
But the crowd was already there, blocking the way with flapping arms, taunts, insults. They spat at the Hummer, tossed beer cans and sticks at it. Others tried to fight their way inside, tugging at the door handles, kicking, punching at the windows.
Hatfield stepped on the gas, raced to the other side, knowing there was no way to do that without people getting hurt. He kept going, soaring through an intersection, sensing another crowd was crouched behind a building somewhere, waiting to pounce. “Everybody okay?” he asked.
He got reluctant grunts in the affirmative. A quick survey of rattled faces suggested there’d be no more sleeping for a while.
Out of nowhere, a vagrant leaped from behind a dumpster, hurled a bottle at the Hummer, and cackled into the night as it cruised past.
Two blocks away, on the other side of the street, a small fire flew toward them—maybe a Molotov cocktail, hard to tell at the speed things were moving—then crashed against the windshield. Jess screamed, long and raspy like something from a nightmare. The fire fluttered out as they drove through the madness, now doing at least ninety.
With the world around them blurring past so rapidly, everyone remained on edge, eyes alert, leaned forward. At that speed, it wasn’t easy to negotiate the streets, swerving to miss objects thrown at them, puzzled pedestrians, cars left behind. Hatfield didn’t dare lift his gaze from the road no matter how crazy the distractions around him.
All the while, his wife’s fingernails dug into his shoulder. “Don’t worry, everybody. We’ll get out of this,” he assured them. “I promise.”
“Out of this and into what?” Justin asked.
“The homestead.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a place my dad was working on,” Hatfield said. “It was still being built when I…” He searched for the most delicate words. “… wasn’t living at home anymore. After my dad’s death, I found out they’d finished it.”
“But you’ve never seen it yourself, right?” Jess asked.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t.” This wasn’t the time for such an emotional conversation. Talking about his mixed feelings about leaving home at fourteen and never seeing either parent again could sting.
His wife seemed to sense this. She replaced her sharp fingernails with a gentle pat.
“It’ll be great to finally see the place,” he said.
“How long before we get there?” Tami asked.
The question made Hatfield smile, reminding him of the kids’ favorite question on their way to Disneyland or Mount Rushmore. “Hard to say,” he answered. “Usually, it would be a drive of about two hours, but with all this insanity swirling around, who knows?”
A clap of thunder startled Jess. A glance into his rear-view mirror told Hatfield it startled his kids also. “Don’t worry, guys. This is good news,” he said, watching the sky darken to gray as the final slivers of the sun disappeared. “Rain will help us. It should put out some of these fires.”
His wife shook her head. “When did you get to be such a glass-half-full guy?”
“It’s not like we have a choice,” he deadpanned. “This is what the world is now.”
She stroked his shoulder but arched her head to see the countryside whip past. It didn’t take long for raindrops to patter against the Hummer. Within seconds, the patter had turned into thumps.
He turned to Jess, taking his eyes from the road just long enough to catch her face creasing into tightness. “You don’t seem like the rain has put you in much of a glass-half-full mood.”
“I’m a pastor’s daughter. We see rain this hard so soon after all the craziness in the world and we check for animals lining up two by two.”
Hatfield grunted out a chuckle. “Don’t worry. Prepared as my dad was, there’s probably an ark at the homestead.”
Jess laughed a little, but her face stiffened at the sight of the road up ahead. The I-77 bridge was out. From a distance, all they could see was a giant roadblock. It wasn’t clear if the bridge had been damaged or flooded.
Hatfield slammed on the brakes, brought the car to a hard skid, and turned it around—a tough move with rain so heavy.
“Do you know another way to get there?” Jess asked.
He paused, searching his brain for an answer until it was obvious he didn’t have one. “I’m sure it won’t be hard to find.”
With the rain now battering the Hummer, Hatfield narrowed his eyes to focus on the lump ahead of them obscured by a sheet of rain. It looked like a crowd—perhaps a group of looters. He honked his horn, but they stayed p
ut.
Out of options, he tried a sharp swerve to the right but then lost traction on the road and skidded out of control, with knee-high water splashing everywhere.
Something rocked against the underside as Hatfield tried—but failed—to tame the wheel’s wild twists. The Hummer’s left side lifted off the ground as they barreled from the road and speared away, surrounded by a pool of dark mud.
Once off the road, the Hummer’s ride came to a loud and clunky end, getting wedged sideways between thick branches of a balsa wood tree
The violent crash into murky land had tossed all bodies aboard into a chaotic mess. Jess and her husband smacked into the dashboards; their kids went face-first into the seats in front of them. Seat-belted as they were, the contact was light, with the shoulder and waist straps’ hard yank doing most of the damage.
Worse yet, the danger wasn’t over. The watery steps of outsiders drew closer and closer.
It took a second, maybe two, for Hatfield to recover, climbing to his feet—not easy with the vehicle tilted that way. “Everybody okay?” he asked, gripping the dashboard tightly to avoid tumbling down and squashing his wife.
After a round of tense “yeah,” he reached for his gun, yanking it free with one hand while unrolling the driver’s side window with the other, his knee hooked around the steering wheel.
After jabbing both arms through the window, he snaked out, pulled himself up, and propped himself at the elbows. He could feel the looters grabbing at the car, tugging at it violently. “Get away from this car now!”
With the rain beating down on the ground and on his Hummer, his words may have gotten lost in the noise. So he tried a less subtle approach, firing his Sig Sauer into the sky three times.
Survive the Day Boxset: EMP Survival in a Powerless World Page 6
