EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 21 | The Darkest Day

by Walker, Robert J.

  A thrumming sound came from the back of the store, and something whizzed past Mary’s face. D-Ruzz’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, and his gun dropped from his suddenly limp hands. He took one step backward, and then collapsed, falling with a loud crash to the floor. In the moonlight, Mary saw that there was an arrow protruding from his forehead.

  Ted stepped out of the shadows, holding the compound bow he’d been examining when D-Ruzz had interrupted them. “Good thing none of those assholes thought to take the archery equipment, huh? I knew all that target practice with my bow back home would pay off one day. Come on, let’s move. I’m gonna take this with me, though, in case we need to make any more silent kills.”

  “And I’m gonna take this,” Mary said, holstering her pistol and picking up the dead thug’s MP5 submachine gun, “in case we need to make some not-so-silent kills.”

  Just then, Mary noticed something on the floor near the counter, among a strewn set of someone’s personal belongings, probably the store owner’s. She walked over to it and saw that it was, as she had suspected, a glasses case. She opened it up and examined the glasses within and noted that they were remarkably similar to James’s original glasses that he had lost in the river. She closed the glasses case and slipped it into a side pocket of her backpack.

  “Let’s go,” Ted said, stepping over D-Ruzz’s corpse.

  They moved cautiously out into the street and scanned it thoroughly for threats. Thankfully, it seemed that D-Ruzz hadn’t alerted any of his companions. The locksmith’s place was a few doors down. Because it was on the opposite side of the street, no moonlight shone in through the broken-down door, and Mary knew that she would have to use her Zippo to explore the store and find the tools she needed.

  “I’ll stand guard by the door while you check the place out,” Ted said. “I hope this light doesn’t attract any unwanted attention. Try to be as quick as you can, baby girl.”

  Mary didn’t need to be told twice; her nerves were already on edge after what had just happened, and she kept having flashbacks of the severed heads on the traffic lights. She crept into the store, lit up her Zippo, and made a beeline for the desk behind the counter, where she knew most locksmiths would keep their lockpicking tools.

  The place had been looted, like everywhere else, but the thugs didn’t really have much use for locks, so they hadn’t taken much from here, they had simply engaged in a riot of destruction and vandalism. Mary sifted through the debris and smashed-up goods, and eventually found some drawers behind the counter. They had all been forced open with a crowbar, but the thieves had found nothing but tools in them, and since none of them knew what the tools were or how to use them, they had simply left them there. Mary saw that everything she needed was there, and she whispered a silent prayer of thanks and then put the tools in her backpack.

  She closed the Zippo, plunging the store into darkness, and then hurried to the door.

  “Come on, Dad, I’ve got what I need, let’s go,” she whispered.

  “We can go back the way we came since that goon isn’t there anymore,” Ted said. “The others should be at the meeting spot now, too, so we can get the hell out of this damn place.”

  They checked the street, then hurried out, and ran swiftly but stealthily back the way they’d come. As they passed the looted convenience store where they’d first seen D-Ruzz, a notion popped into Mary’s head.

  “Dad, hold on,” she said. “I think we should check this store quickly.”

  “What for? It’s been thoroughly looted, there’s probably nothing but junk left in it.”

  “Why would they have someone guarding it then?” she asked. “There must be something worth protecting in it. Maybe they’re keeping the medicine they took from William in here, and some other valuable stuff.”

  Ted scratched his chin. “You have a point, baby girl. Let’s have a quick look. You go in, I’ll keep watch out here.”

  Mary stepped into the store and walked around it, shaking her head at the state of the place. It looked like a hurricane had hit it; there was barely a square inch of the floor that was visible due to the trash-strewn everywhere. There were a few bags of chips, cans of spam, and chocolate bars left on some of the shelves, but Mary was sure that there had to be something more valuable than a few items of junk food in here.

  “Come on, D-Ruzz, what were you guarding in here?” she whispered as she explored the store.

  There was cash lying around everywhere, as there had been in the hunting goods store, but she was sure that the $100 bills weren’t what D-Ruzz had been protecting. Finally, she got to the back of the store, where there was an ice-cream freezer. She peered into it and grinned. “Jackpot,” she whispered.

  The freezer, which was broken, like everything electronic, was crammed to the brim with medicines and medical supplies of all sorts, and Mary recognized the most recent additions to the stash: they were the exact medicines she had seen in the homestead’s medical trailer—the medicine William had stolen.

  “Dad, get in here, quick!” she said.

  Ted raced in with his rifle at the ready, expecting some sort of trouble. However, when the moonlight revealed the look on his daughter’s face, he lowered the weapon.

  “Open your backpack, hurry,” she said. She had already stuffed half her backpack full of medicine and supplies.

  “My God,” he gasped when he saw what was in the ice cream freezer. “It’s all our medical supplies, and more!”

  “Hurry, Dad, fill your backpack!”

  Both of them got busy filling their backpacks up, and soon they’d managed to clean out most of the supplies in the freezer.

  “We’d better get back to the meeting point,” Ted said, “before the others think something happened to us. Good thing you decided to look in this place, baby girl; you saved us all!”

  With their spirits high and their mood now buoyant, the two of them walked out of the convenience store. Just as they stepped out onto the street, though, they saw a curious and disturbing sight. A block away, a firework rocket streaked up into the night sky, hissing and spitting out sparks as it raced upwards. Then it burst above them in a dazzling shower of pink arcs of light, and the boom of its explosion resounded across the dark, silent town.

  “What on earth is going on?” Mary gasped, staring in both awe and horror at the lights in the sky.

  Then gunfire broke out, and more firework rockets were fired into the air. From all over the town, shouts of rage and roars of aggression started to sound.

  “Oh shit,” Ted murmured. “They’re signals, to wake up the army! We’ve been discovered! Run!”

  31

  Mary and Ted raced down the street, running at full tilt. There was no point in trying to be stealthy now; all they could do was try to survive and get out of town alive. A great roar was resounding through the town; T-Dawg hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said he had an army, it seemed. From the sound of the many roaring, howling voices, Ted guessed that there were at least a hundred people, maybe even more. If they didn’t get out immediately, they would certainly all be slaughtered.

  He and Mary veered around a corner, only to find two armed men rushing out of one of the smashed-up stores. No words or threats were exchanged; the men, both burly, scarred street thugs, immediately raised their guns and started shooting. Mary dove behind an abandoned car, while Ted flung himself flat onto the ground and returned fire.

  The thugs’ many bullets were poorly aimed, and they slammed into the car, smashing out its windows and punching holes through the doors, but Ted only needed two shots; each one snapped a man’s head back and made his body flop into a dead heap on the ground.

  “Got the bastards, let’s move!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet.

  He and Mary raced onward, while the sounds of shouting and yelling and stomping boots grew louder and more frantic behind them. It seemed like enemy men were crawling out from everywhere; the whole town was full of them.

  “You’re
dead, motherfuckers!” a gangster yelled, bursting suddenly from a graffiti-covered house to their right, an M-16 in his hands. He unleashed a burst of fully-automatic fire that kicked up spurts of dust around Mary’s feet and hammered the wall behind her, showering her with masonry dust, but adrenalin was surging through her veins, and instead of panicking she returned fire with the MP5 she’d taken from D-Ruzz, putting a short burst of rounds into his torso and dropping him instantly.

  “We have to get into the woods!” Ted said. “The longer we stay on these streets, the slimmer our chances of survival are! This way!”

  He jumped over a graffitied picket fence in front of one of the houses and sprinted through the yard. A gangster with a shotgun popped out of one of the broken windows and blasted a shot at Ted, which missed him by mere inches and took a football-sized chunk out of the fence next to him. But Ted was quick to return fire before his adversary could squeeze off another shot, and he slammed a few AR-15 rounds into the man’s chest. The gangster staggered backward into the house and collapsed, but Ted didn’t bother to wait and see if he was dead; there was no time for that. He just kept running, with Mary following hot on his heels.

  They jumped the fence at the back, shot another gangster who ran at them with an Uzi in his hand, and then, after dashing across the backyard, they got into the woods. Sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard nearby; it seemed that the other group of homesteaders was fighting a running battle as they too tried to escape the town.

  “This way,” Ted said, racing through the trees. “From the ridge up there, we can lay down some cover fire for ‘em.”

  Mary sprinted along behind him, charged up on adrenalin. After a minute or two of running, they got up onto the ridge, which looked down over the west section of town. They saw Callum, alone, running down one of the streets, pursued by a mob of over a dozen gangsters, with whom he was exchanging fire.

  “Give ‘em hell, baby girl, give ‘em hell!” Ted said, taking aim at the gangsters.

  He and Mary started shooting, picking off targets from their position of cover. The gangsters, unaware where this sudden attack was coming from, scattered in panic and tried to take cover themselves. This gave Callum a small window of opportunity to escape, and while Mary and Ted continued to rain down a storm of bullets on the gangsters, the homesteaders charged through one of the deserted houses’ yards, scrambled over a fence, raced through another yard and then got into the woods.

  “Callum, up here!” Mary yelled. Her MP5 was out of ammo, and since she hadn’t taken any ammo from D-Ruzz, all she could do now was discard the weapon and draw her pistol.

  Callum, breathing hard, his eyes wide with fear, raced up to meet them on the ridge.

  “Where are the others?!” Ted asked. “Dammit, I’m outta ammo!”

  “Nathan and Evander got shot, killed,” Callum gasped, panting and shaking. “Bruce, though, I don’t know, he was right behind me until a minute ago, then … I don’t know, I just don’t know…”

  “Dammit, shit, dammit!” Ted cursed. Still, before he could begin to think about this, he had to make sure the three of them survived the next few minutes. “Move, before they figure out our position!” he said.

  He led them on a high-speed race through the woods, zigzagging and slaloming through the trees, until, after five minutes, they got to another ridge, which was deeper into the woods but which still commanded a good view over a large portion of the town. They stopped here, and Ted took a look through his binoculars to see if he could see any sign of Bruce or the others who Callum had said had been shot.

  He didn’t need to look for very long. One of the largest houses in the neighborhood had a big, flat deck as part of the roof, and T-Dawg and some of his men walked out onto it. Two of the men were carrying corpses, slung over their shoulders like sacks of potatoes. One was Nathan’s, and the other was Evander’s. What was far more alarming, though, was that T-Dawg had Bruce with him, and while the student was still alive, he was badly wounded and was bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound in his stomach, and only seemed to be half-conscious.

  “Yo, farmers!” T-Dawg roared in the woods. “I know y’all are out there, and I know y’all can hear and see me! I got your boy here! Come out and show yourselves, and maybe I’ll let this scrawny motherfucker live!”

  “Dad, what do we do?” Mary whispered.

  “I know y’all can hear me!” T-Dawg roared. “Where the fuck y’all at? Show yourselves, come down here and face me like men! Y’all wanna fuck with us, come down here and fuck with us!”

  “If we reveal our position now, we’re all dead,” Ted whispered back. “And we’re out of range to make any sort of accurate shot with our pistols. There’s … there’s nothing we can do.”

  “All right, you chicken shit motherfuckers, y’all wanna hide like this, huh?” T-Dawg snarled. “Lemme show you what happens to people who fuck with me! Lemme show y’all!”

  He drew his machete and gave his men a nod. They grinned and threw the dead bodies of Nathan and Evander down. Then they grabbed the corpses’ hair and pulled up their torsos. With two swifts, brutal swipes of his machete, T-Dawg separated their heads from their bodies. The gangsters on the roof and in the streets around the house cheered and howled with vicious bloodlust. T-Dawg laughed and grabbed each severed head and tossed each one into the crowd.

  “Where the fuck are y’all?!” T-Dawg roared, pacing back and forth and staring up at the woods. “I know y’all saw that shit! Last chance to come out now, motherfuckers, or your boy’s head is gon’ be next!”

  “Dad, they’re gonna, they’re gonna…” Mary whimpered, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing.

  “We have to go,” Ted said softly, his voice bitter with sadness and crushing defeat. “Don’t watch what happens next … we have to go.”

  Mary took one last look at T-Dawg and Bruce, who was being held by two of the gangsters. One of them gripped Bruce’s hair, yanking his lolling head up so that T-Dawg could look him in the eye before he killed him. Upon the ridge, Callum reached over and gripped Mary’s hand, squeezing it tightly and sobbing as he wept.

  T-Dawg howled out an inhuman roar and slashed with his machete. And in the woods, Ted, Mary and Callum ran.

  32

  They cycled back to the homestead without sleep, riding through the dawn and the morning stopping only for short rest and food breaks. While they were stopped, nobody spoke; the pain of the loss of the others was still too sharp and acute. Finally, they made it back to the homestead in the afternoon.

  If the fact that they had arrived back days early didn’t clue the rest of the homesteaders into the fact that something had gone badly wrong, the looks on their faces certainly did. Mary, Ted, and Callum all looked haggard and pale, and all wore deep expressions of pain and anguish.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” Ann asked, running to meet them when they rode wearily into the center of the homestead, by the firepit.

  “Where’s everyone else?” Dr. Krueger asked, shuffling out of his trailer with a worried expression on his face.

  Ted shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice cracked with emotion, and tears rimmed his eyes. “They’re … dead. Killed. Shot.”

  “Mom!” Ann gasped, throwing her arms around Mary. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I’m okay, sweetie, I’m okay,” Mary gasped, her voice also choked with raw emotion, hugging her daughter tightly.

  “The town’s been taken over by a gang,” Callum muttered grimly. “We got our medicine back, but we paid the ultimate price for it. Nathan, Evander, and Bruce paid for it … with their lives.”

  Cries and gasps of shock, horror, and grief erupted from the gathering crowd of homesteaders. Those who had been close to the three who had died broke down and wept, and others also struck with grief, did their best to comfort them while sobbing and weeping themselves.

  Mary also broke down and wept, collapsing into her daughter’s arms. James, who could barely see anythin
g, was helped over to Mary and Ann by another homesteader.

  “I found … some glasses … for you, James,” Mary managed to gasp through her tears. She disengaged from her hug with Ann and dried her eyes. Still choking down tight sobs, she took off her backpack and took out the glasses she’d found.

  James took them from her with trembling hands. “Thanks, Aunt Mary,” he said glumly. Even when he put them on and could finally see clearly again, this was not enough to lift his morose mood. “This is all my fault,” he muttered, his shoulders slumping and his head hanging low. “If you hadn’t left this place to go find some glasses for me, Nathan, Evander, and Bruce would still be alive.”

  “No, no, James,” Mary said, taking him firmly by the shoulders and forcing him to look her in the eye. “It’s not your fault. Not at all, do you understand me? If anyone’s to blame, it’s William. He stole our medical supplies and deserted us, and regardless of the situation with your glasses, we had to go out and get those back. Without them, a lot more people would have died unnecessarily. It’s not your fault at all, James, not even a tiny bit.”

  “I just wish I wasn’t so useless,” James murmured.

  “Honey, you’re not useless, not at all,” Mary said, more gently now. “Don’t ever think that. Look at all the work you’ve done on the homestead in the last few weeks. Do you know how impressed Ted is with you? Come on, sweetie, don’t talk like that. And now that you’re able to see well again, you’ll be even more helpful and productive than ever, right?”

  James only seemed half-convinced, but he nodded, nonetheless.

  “Everyone, I’m sorry to be the bearer of even more bad news,” Ted said grimly after he had given everyone a few minutes to grieve and deal with the impact of the death of the three homesteaders. “But the deaths of our three friends are only the start of this.”