“Don’t know the names of everything, ma’am, but if it looked like medicine, we grabbed it.”
“Good,” she said, picking up pill bottles and reading the labels. She also pulled out bandages and other stuff from the bag. “Yeah, this stuff should be helpful.”
“When you get done with the serious stuff,” her husband said, “I got a little scrape that needs tending to.” He lifted his hand, showing his palm.
“That looks pretty serious to me,” she answered. “You sure it doesn’t hurt?”
“It hurts like the devil. But this doesn’t seem like the time for crying.”
Jess bit her lip and gave him a soft smile. Then she looked down, saw something fading in the captain’s eyes. “You still hanging on there, big guy?”
He chuckled weakly. “Doing the best I can.”
She reached into the bag and found two white rubber gloves. After slipping her hands into them, she pulled out a bottle and held it up to the light to read the label. “This is gonna sting a little, Captain.”
“I’m ready, ma’am.”
A cough down the hallway caught her attention. She reached into the bag and pulled out another bottle. After checking it, she tossed it to the homesteader, who coughed. “Anybody still coughing, give this a try. If that doesn’t help, see me. I’ll see what I can do.”
She poured from the bottle, dousing Cecil’s wound. The leader sucked air through his clenched teeth, swallowing a scream. “That’s your idea of stinging a little?”
“Sorry.”
“No, no, don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
“Need any help, Mom?” Tami asked.
“Yeah, honey. You and your brother go into that dorm room and do everything you can to clean things up. Make sure there’s no dust around.” She looked around at other wounds. “The rest of you injured guys, go ahead and wait for me in there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” one of them said on his way out of the hallway.
Hatfield asked, “You want me to help get Cecil in there, too?”
“No, I suppose this is just as good a place as any for him. If we’d waited any longer, he might not have—” She stopped herself before finishing her sentence. Then she added, “He might not have done so well.”
Cecil said, “Mrs. Hatfield, you can be as blunt as you need to be. If you want to say I would have had my hefty behind carried off to the great beyond, you have my full permission to say just that.”
A smile leaked out from beneath her stone-hard face.
Minutes later, Hatfield waited outside the makeshift hospital room, peeking through the door’s crack to get a glimpse of what was happening. His hand continued to throb, but as he’d said himself, this wasn’t the time for crying. He stared at the wound, noticed the blood was hard and dark. Jess had told him to wash it out as thoroughly as he could, but it wasn’t easy. It would only start to bleed seconds after any kind of contact.
Clamping his fingers together was also a problem. He could curl each finger to within about a half-inch before the pain was too much. And pressing anything against his palm was agony.
From inside, Jess called, “Come on in, honey!”
Stepping in, he chuckled, “I assume I’m the honey you had in mind.”
“The one and only,” she said, her voice muffled by a scrap of cloth covering her face. “Make yourself comfy right here,” she said, patting the mattress to her right as she tended to Cecil.
Before getting onto the bed, Hatfield took a look around and saw bandaged and sleeping bodies. The damage they’d sustained was huge, and it wasn’t clear if they could realistically survive.
He took a seat on the mattress, watching Jess smooth out a bandage on the captain’s torso. His face remained rock-solid throughout, but Hatfield knew it had to hurt.
“Trevor,” Cecil slurred, his eyes growing bleary. “I want to talk to you about your father.”
Jess said, “You’re going to have to make it a brief talk, Captain. Once that Vicodin kicks in, you’ll be eight miles high—at least.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She gave her husband a playful shove to get him on the mattress, face-up, then started patting his palm with something that stung as Cecil went on.
“Your father, Trevor, was a man of great integrity. Courageous, wise, selfless.” His voice began to fade in volume and intensity. “And from what I’ve heard about your conduct when the compound was under siege earlier today, he would have looked up to you. You were exactly the man he wanted to be.”
“He wanted to be?” Hatfield asked. “What do you mean?”
“Well… “ Cecil whimpered, his voice growing dim, indistinct. “As you know, he was, by all means, prepared for battle but never actually had to fight. So he was never really tested. But I’m sure if he had been…”
“If he had been what?” he turned, waiting for a reply. But the captain was out.
Jess nodded to him as if she knew the end of the sentence. She bandaged his hand in silence. Afterward, she pressed a thumb against his palm, then stopped when she noticed the hard clench of his teeth.
“You think my hand will be okay?” her husband asked.
“Should be. But to be honest, I can’t make any promises. These aren’t exactly the best conditions to perform medical procedures.”
“Is it the medicine? What else do you need?”
“Well, we could always use more of everything just in case. But the main issue is germs. In a place like this, we can’t prevent cuts from getting infected.”
He stared at his hand, tried to clamp his fingers once again. More pain.
“Now we’re going to need you to find another room to recover. We really could use this bed.”
“Okay.” He dragged his exhausted body off the mattress, then kissed her on the forehead before moving away.
“Watch those germs, honey,” she said. “And thank you. I needed that.”
Hatfield opened the door to the den and saw his son and daughter engaged in a heated ping-pong match. No arguments yet, but he figured it was only a matter of time. The competitiveness was live in their scowls.
He took a seat on the couch, watching them, happy to see some aspect of his family drifting back to normality. “You guys did a great job in the room, keeping everything clean and whatnot.”
When a ball slipped past his daughter, she sighed. “Thanks a lot for the distraction, Dad.”
Meanwhile, Justin celebrated his win with a series of fist pumps. “Yes, yes, yes! Victorious again!”
“Sorry, Tami,” her father said.
His kids took a seat next to him on the couch. Justin said, “That dude really seemed like he knew what he was talking about.”
“What dude?”
He pointed to the stack of articles. “Your dad.”
Hatfield couldn’t contain a laugh at the idea of someone referring to his father as a “dude.” That had to be a first. He picked up the stack and started reading in a random place. The first article he landed on was leadership, mostly a condensed speech he’d heard before. The kind he’d simply ignore. But somehow, the words resonated and mattered more than before.
The best way for a leader to lead, the sergeant had written, is by example. A leader doesn’t demand those under him do anything he won’t do—or can’t—do.
He looked at his hand, trying again to ball up his fingers. He failed once again. The words felt like an indictment. Am I a leader? he asked himself.
Hours later, Hatfield walked into the living room. The homesteaders gathered there, taking the idle moment for chit-chat. Figuring this was as good a time as any to get to know the guys, Hatfield shook some hands and introduced himself.
It was nice to see how much he had in common with them—even the ones whose path he’d never crossed. The very fact that they were familiar with his father’s tactics and teachings meant they could relate like long-lost half-brothers who shared a father from their past.
After a while, the guys started a roun
d of poker, with Hatfield learning to his surprise that the beloved sergeant was a fan of the game. He scooped up his first hand and took a look as a grin slipped onto his face. “Hard to imagine my dad doing anything for fun, especially gambling.”
From behind, an unfamiliar voice sounded off. “Oh, you’d be surprised, Trevor. That fellow was capable of all kinds of fun.”
He turned and saw a heavy-set, bearded homesteader, his face warmed by a smile as he walked to the poker table with a large rectangular box in his hand. “Of course, he always made sure the work got done before the fun began. And speaking of the old man, I came across this a few hours ago.”
“What is it?”
“Letters. To you. I expect he intended to mail them at some point but probably didn’t know where to send them.”
“Thank you.” He took the box, then gave the man’s face a closer look, noticing traces of gray in his beard, wrinkles in his face. He was slightly younger than Cecil. “You knew my dad?”
“Sure did. As a matter of fact, I served with him. He was a good man. A man of honor.”
The two men shook hands. “Trevor Hatfield, nice to meet you.”
“I’m First Lieutenant Stallworth. Call me Vinnie. You may want to finish playing before you check those letters out. Looks like a lot of reading.”
“Sure does.” Hatfield nodded and placed the box under the table, then tried to get his head back into the game. But he only lasted another five minutes before he had to scoop up the box and dash out of the room. “I’ll be right back, guys.”
In the den, which was doubling as the Hatfields’ bedroom, he saw his wife teaching his daughter how to knit while Justin read a magazine.
“What ya got there, honey?” Jess asked him.
“Letters. From my dad.”
Every head looked up as he opened the first letter.
Dear Son,
I hope you somehow get this letter. It’s taken a long time to write it. Your mother urged me to do so for several years, but if you know anything, you know how bullheaded and stubborn your father is.
I’m not sure how to begin this. There’s a lot to say, and I may not have the right words to say everything. You may have noticed I wasn’t great when it came to having the right words. And sometimes, when the situation demanded an emotional reaction, I didn’t have any words at all.
The best I can say at this point is to accept the sense of regret that I feel. It shouldn’t have surprised me to learn that you’d eventually get sick of the lifestyle your mother and I had. It’s not the kind of life any teenager would want. It was a sad day when we looked up and saw that you’d gone. I feared something had happened to you, but your mother knew differently. She could see something in her son’s eyes that told her he wasn’t happy and would never be happy that way. But I was naïve. I didn’t understand. It wasn’t until I saw your stuff gone in addition to your backpack that I realized that you had taken off.
By the time you will read this, I’ll be dead. And you’ll be a grown man, hopefully, a family man of honor.
Ernest Hatfield, Sergeant First Class, US Army.
Reading the letter’s salutation, he grunted out a laugh.
He then noticed a hand on his shoulder, stroking it gently. “What’s so funny?” Jess asked.
“The Sergeant First Class, that’s what. Nobody but Dad would sign a letter to his son that way.”
“Not the warm-and-compassionate type, huh?”
He turned to his wife. “Come on. You’ve heard the stories.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never met the man. It would have been nice to. It would have been great to see where you came from.”
Hatfield bit his lower lip and nodded. His head swirled with all kinds of thoughts, most of them troubling. “Do you think I’m a man of honor?”
She laughed at the question, then gave him a playful slap. “Of course you are. You work hard, help raise the kids right. Always treat people well. If you’re not a man of honor, I don’t know who is.”
As she stepped away, he brought his eyes back to the letter and mumbled an answer his wife couldn’t hear. “I do. Sergeant First Class Earnest Hatfield, that was a man of honor. A man I’ll never be.”
18
The morning air was calm and eerily quiet as Hatfield stepped out of the compound. When he heard steps come up behind him, he turned to see a homesteader whose name he didn’t know, rifle strapped to his back.
“Didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that. Just coming out a little early to do my guard duty,” the young guy said. “Thought I’d get some target practice before my rounds.”
“No, that’s fine. I’m Trevor, by the way. Trevor Hatfield.” He reached for a handshake.
“I’m Jespersen. Cody Jesper—” he started to say, giving his hand a firm shake.
But Hatfield had to pull his hand away, mid-shake. “Ow. Keep forgetting about that!”
“Hand still bothering you?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring at the palm. “Maybe I need to join you for target practice, make sure I can still shoot.” He pulled the pistol from its holster and did his best to clamp his fingers around the gun’s butt. With a pained grunt, he was able to hold it—barely.
As Cody squatted next to him, firing at a haystack roughly fifty yards away, Hatfield raised his gun and aimed at the same target. But even the act of squeezing the trigger was beyond him. When he tried, the bullet flew astray, and the gun flew from his grip, landing in the tall grass.
He tried again and did no better the second time, unable to even hold it steady this time.
Cody sent him a soft and sympathetic look, saying, “You know, maybe you’d be better off trying a rifle.”
“Yeah,” Hatfield said, forcing about a laugh. “That might be a better idea.”
He shouldered the rifle, squatted into position, and reached his hand toward the trigger. But clamping his fingers around the trigger guard and on the trigger was something he couldn’t handle no matter how he tried to angle his hand. With a long grunt, he surrendered, then pulled back from the rifle and stared at it.
The homesteader sent his eyes to the ground, seeming to avoid uneasy eye contact. “I’m sure your hand will get better soon anyway.”
Hatfield nodded, then took a look at his fingers, noticing his forefinger had started to darken a little. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before—”
Cody held up a hand, nodding toward a figure in the distance barely visible in the tall weeds. “You see that, Mr. Hatfield?”
“Looks like something out there. Not sure what it is. You know if there are wolves in any part of this area?”
The young man shook his head, not daring to pull his gaze away from whatever it was in the distance.
Hatfield saw the figure duck, then disappear in the weeds. Cody reached for his rifle, then shouldered it. After a glance through the scope, he pulled away, searching for something. When he spotted a table five feet away, he turned it to its side and perched himself behind it. “Might be a wolf, might be something else.”
Before too long, both men had found barriers to get behind. They watched the seemingly empty landscape and waited. Minutes passed with no movement. Cody came out of the crouch, looked across the field. He stepped closer, leaned against the fence. “If there’s something out there, it must be—”
A shot clapped through the air. Cody reached down, grabbed his ankle. “Ahh!” he groaned.
Hatfield reflexively started out from behind his barrier, then stopped himself and gave the landscape a scan. He spotted a shooter ten feet before the fence, loading his rifle for the next shot.
Hobbling, Cody lay there, clutching his ankle, a pained grunt coming through his gritted teeth. Hatfield quickly added things up, tried to figure out his next move. He could run after Cody, try to pull him behind a barrier. But the shooter would get away.
So he chose another plan, slowly raising his pistol to the shooter who clearly couldn’t see him. With his right
hand wounded, he used both hands, gripping tightly and using the forefinger on his left hand to place on the trigger. After locking the shooter in his view, he gave himself a mental pep talk. You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.
Then he squeezed the trigger.
The gun clumsily snapped out of his hand. A split second later, the shooter took another shot that ended with a geyser of blood and Cody screaming.
Hatfield scooped the gun from the ground and tried again.
The shooter took three more shots. They all connected and splattered blood over Cody’s chest and belly as his body curled into a disaster, limbs flailing, spine arched. He then tried another shot but only produced dry clicks.
As Hatfield kept fumbling with his gun, the shooter raced away. It was too late to save Cody. As footsteps raced toward him from behind, he heard his wife’s frantic voice. “Oh, no! Please, please, please! What happened, honey?”
He turned, saw three or four homesteaders, most of them in bandages around Jess, rifles drawn. Shattered, he couldn’t find the words at first. Instead, he just lifted his hand. After swallowing hard, he said, “I couldn’t shoot.” He dropped his head, not wanting anyone to see his eyes water.
Nathan stood in the doorway of the barn, watching bedlam unfold. Inside, there was fighting, screaming, guys throwing haymakers, and guys pulling guns on each other. The gang leader just stood there, shaking his head and wondering how long this kind of madness had to continue.
He turned to the three former homesteaders and said, “Real colorful bunch, wouldn’t you say?”
Andy nodded. The other two kept their eyes down, afraid of saying the wrong thing.
Grace asked, “You think you could maybe undo our shackles? My wrists are starting to hurt.”
“Mine too,” Gary added.
“Shut up!” Nathan exploded. “You will be released when I can fully trust you.”
Survive the Day Boxset: EMP Survival in a Powerless World Page 11
