Reclaiming The Homestead: An EMP Survival story (BEYOND THE GRID Book 3)

by Connor Mccoy

  Soon Jacob found a patch of ground in the shadow of a large oak tree. “What do you think?” he asked his family. “Looks like a fine place to rest for the night.”

  “Perfect,” Brandon said. “Now I get to go pee.”

  “Sweetie, if you had to go, we would have stopped,” Domino said with a laugh.

  After putting his bag and backpack on the dirt, Brandon broke for the trees. “Hey, don’t pee in any stream we have to drink from!” Jubilee cried as he disappeared behind a tree. Once he was gone, Jubilee added, “I think he’d do that and not tell me.”

  As Brandon did his business, Jacob paced around in the shadow of the tree. No doubt about it. They should sleep well here tonight.

  He thought of his wife teaching his daughter how to handle her bathroom needs outdoors. Maybe it was time he gauged how well he had taught his daughter other things.

  Jacob stood back, nearly bumping into the bark of the oak tree. “It’s all yours, Jubilee.”

  Jubilee began by peeling bark from a paper birch and a tulip poplar. She shredded it down into a fine tinder bundle, which she added to a group of dry grass she had gathered from their surroundings.

  From there, she whipped out a steel object from her pack that fit over her knuckles. Next, she pulled out a tiny piece of dark cloth and a pinch of flint. She laid the cloth over the flint. Domino and Brandon’s eyes widened a little. They knew what was coming next.

  Jubilee struck the combo of the flint and cloth with her steel. A single spark jumped onto the cloth and produced an ember at the center of the tinder. Jubilee then blew on the ember.

  The fire leaped to life. A few more breaths from Jubilee increased its flame. She stood back, satisfied. Jacob, Domino and Brandon clapped.

  That’s my girl, Jacob thought. He had built many fires, but he felt greater satisfaction in watching his daughter it than during any of his previous experiences lighting a campfire.

  Jacob’s eyes fell on his pack. Well, there was one thing he was itching to do. He waited just a little longer so he wouldn’t steal the glory from Jubilee. He decided to linger until Domino and Brandon started unpacking their dinner.

  “I have the perfect addition to our dinner fire.” Jacob searched his pack until he found what he was looking for. “My IRS 1040 tax booklet!” Jacob flipped through the pages. “Odds are, we’ll never get one of these in our lives again. So, it’s only fitting we give it the fiery burial it deserves.”

  Domino laughed. “Where did you find that?”

  “Under the mat in the back. I must have been in one hell of a hurry.” Jacob flipped to the middle of the booklet and tore out a page. “Now, I’m not going to burn it all at once, because the pages might snuff out the flame. It’s a pity, but we’re going to have to burn this sucker piece by piece.” Jacob kept a big smile to belie his professed pity.

  He tossed a page onto the flame. The fire quickly turned the white page to black, the smooth surface crumpling up as it sank into the flames. Domino clapped and cheered, with the two kids joining in.

  Jacob sat on the ground as Domino hoisted the cooking pot atop the small cooking grill. The fire soon would heat up the roasted chicken inside and treat the family to a hot meal.

  The scene was so peaceful and cheerful that Jacob was amazed to think how dangerous things had been just a few days ago. They had been dodging the bullets of madmen on Doc Sam’s property. Now they were enjoying dinner cooked by a campfire.

  A rustling in the bushes interrupted his thoughts. He spun around, eyeing a gap in two small trees. A shadow retreated from the bushes—a human one.

  Domino stood up. “Jay!”

  “I saw him!” Jacob charged toward the gap. “Watch the kids!”

  If that was a person, Jacob had to confront him, figure out what he wanted. He couldn’t risk the stranger returning in the night while they slept. If he was a son of a bitch looking for trouble, Jacob was determined to make sure the man knew he had messed with the wrong family.

  Upon breaching the gap, he spotted his prey. The mystery man was running, or actually hobbling, back through the woods.

  “Hey!” Jacob shouted. “Stop right there!”

  His shout seemed to startle the intruder, who promptly tripped and fell down. As Jacob closed in, the person cried out in a feminine voice, “Please don’t hurt me! Please! I just smelled the food and I’m very hungry!”

  Their visitor was a woman. In fact, her voice sounded very familiar to Jacob’s ears. He slowed down, taking a moment to look at her form. She was face down in the dirt. He reached out for her arm and took it.

  “No! Don’t touch me!” she cried.

  “Easy, easy. I’m not going to hurt you,” Jacob said.

  She felt limp. She didn’t have a lot of strength, which only intensified Jacob’s suspicions. As he turned her over to expose her face to the moonlight, his eyes widened in horror.

  He could not deny he was looking at the face of his sister—Sheryl Avery.

  Chapter Five

  “Sheryl!” Jacob softened his grip. “Sheryl, my God!”

  Sheryl’s eyes blinked rapidly. “Jacob?”

  She acted as if she couldn’t recognize him. She wasn’t used to the dark of night. Jacob had spent a lot of time outdoors at night, so he understood how to focus in and draw in details in places with sparse light. Sheryl’s only experience with the night was in cities or suburbs with surrounding street lights. She was not used to the woods, illuminated only by the Moon and the stars.

  “Sheryl, it’s me! Jacob! Are you alright? What the hell happened?”

  Jacob knelt down to try assessing her physical state, but it was hard to see her in any great detail under these trees.

  “Jacob?” Sheryl’s voice cracked. “Is that really you?”

  Jacob took his sister’s right hand and ran it up the side of his face. “In the flesh, Sherry.” He hadn’t used that nickname on her since high school. He hoped it broke through.

  Sheryl broke out in a sob, which cracked quickly with a spate of coughing. Jacob sat there with her.

  “Jay?” Domino cried out, “What’s going on?”

  “It’s alright!” Jacob shouted back. “It’s Sheryl!”

  “Your sister?” Domino hurried over to them with Brandon and Jubilee right behind. “Sheryl, it is you!” Domino knelt down next to her.

  “Aunt Sheryl!” Jubilee almost knocked into her mother while trying to squat down beside Sheryl.

  Sheryl glanced at them haggardly, barely able to focus. “Domino…babies…” She coughed.

  “We should get her to camp.” Jacob turned to each member of his family as he spoke. “She’s probably malnourished.” Turning back to Sheryl, Jacob said to her, “We’ve got supplies. We’ll help you. I just…”

  Jacob pulled Sheryl close to him and hugged her. Sheryl sobbed a little more as her brother held her.

  Domino lifted the cup from Sheryl’s lips. “We’ll get you some more,” she said as she passed it to Jubilee.

  Sheryl nodded once. She sat against the bark of the oak tree, her legs outstretched across the dirt. The light of the campfire allowed Jacob to get a look at his sister’s condition. He tried hiding his pain. Sheryl had been through a lot.

  Sheryl Marie Avery was the first strong woman Jacob ever had known, strong in that she could melt life itself with her gaze. She knew what she wanted to do with her life and went with it, putting herself through college and then going into the medical profession. She also knew how life was to be lived. She was a woman of strong conviction. She hated the urban life she and her brother lived growing up.

  However, she believed she could make a life in the city work for her. It was just a matter of not running with the wrong crowd. Jacob, however, wanted to get away from city life entirely. It was one thing they did not see eye to eye on. Unfortunately, that disagreement pushed a big enough wedge between them that they only saw each other occasionally. Ironically, they would have run into each other soon enough because Ja
cob was taking Jubilee to the hospital where Sheryl worked. It was the EMP that delayed their reunion.

  Looking at her, Jacob was aghast. Her brown polyester pants were torn and caked with dirt and mud. Her light blue shirt, less dirty but still marred with soil, clung to her chest due to her sweat.

  Additionally, Jacob always remembered Sheryl’s hair for its vibrancy. She was a natural redhead and always wore her hair with a slight curl across her shoulders. Now her hair looked very limp, with little streaks of dirt down her strands.

  Brandon passed a plate of freshly cooked chicken to Jacob. “Alright. I’m sure you’ve probably been dreaming of something like this.” He handed it to Sheryl. “Now, don’t wolf this down. I know you’re starving. Just ease into it, take a few bites. Let your system get used to taking in food again.”

  “How long have you been out here?” Domino asked.

  “Let’s try to get her strength back,” Jacob quickly said. “We’re ready to hear Sheryl’s story whenever she wants to tell it.”

  Sheryl said, almost in a whisper, “Thanks.” From there, she started taking small bites.

  Jacob watched her green eyes. The strength was returning to them. Her eyes were at ease. She no longer was frightened.

  He looked at Sheryl gazing at Domino for a moment. Sheryl never had been fond of Domino, not from the start, when Domino had started going out with him, and not since. Sheryl had not liked the family Domino came from. Even when Domino had left her family and wanted to join Jacob out near the Blue Ridge Mountains, it did nothing for Sheryl.

  Sheryl wiped her mouth. She was moving more. Perhaps she would talk about her experiences soon.

  But how did she get out here? It seemed like such a coincidence to run into his own sister in the woods like this.

  Finally, when he was convinced his sister might speak, Jacob spoke up. “We were on our way to see you when everything shut down.”

  “I know. Domino texted me,” Sheryl said.

  “What happened? You obviously got out of town, thank God,” Jacob said. “But how’d you make it out here?”

  Sheryl stabbed a piece of remaining chicken. “I don’t even know myself. I can’t believe I’m actually alive and that I found you.” She chewed on her morsel bitterly, only speaking when she was starting to swallow. “I was on my break when everything went out. I tried using my phone, didn’t get anywhere. I looked outside and saw cars everywhere just crashed into each other. I didn’t know what was going on.”

  “The EMP,” Domino said.

  “Yeah. I heard some people saying that.” Sheryl stabbed her fork again. “I went back to the hospital. I thought I should stay, try helping people who I knew were coming in from accidents or whatever. And then all of a sudden, Doctor Rhodes, he’s my superior, he came running up to us with bugged-out eyes and covered in sweat. He just kept telling us to run. “Run, run run!”

  Sheryl shook a little. She waited until she calmed down before continuing.

  “A mob was approaching the hospital. We were scared out of our wits. Doctor Rhodes said he knew what was coming and we had to flee. I almost didn’t. I thought, surely, we could calm everyone down. But my co-worker Missy practically dragged me out the building. A few of us left.” Sheryl swallowed hard. “I heard later on that the place was completely ransacked. Doctor Rhodes was killed. A lot of people I knew in there died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Domino said.

  Sheryl stirred her plate as she spoke. “I made it home. I thought maybe I could hide there until help arrived, but somehow, the lightbulb went on in my head that no help was coming. And if I stayed there, I probably was going to die.” She looked at Jacob with narrowed eyes. “You know that little survival pouch you sent me?”

  “Yeah, the one with the map with my homestead and the instructions for how to survive in a disaster scenario?” Jacob replied.

  “Yeah. Believe it or not, the thing came in handy. If I hadn’t had that map, I wouldn’t have made it here. I grabbed it, grabbed whatever was still good from my fridge and set out to your house.” Sheryl smiled crookedly. “Yeah, I was going to hike all the way to your place on foot.”

  Despite Sheryl’s smile, Jacob knew Sheryl was hiding a lot of pain. It would have taken days to make it to his homestead without a working vehicle. Sheryl had no training in outdoor survival. All Jacob could do was write down everything he knew could sustain her until she made it to his home.

  Sheryl took another bite before proceeding with her tale. “Everything afterward was pure hell. Just getting out of the city was a bitch. I was running, hiding, sticking to the shadows. One time I ducked inside a canal pipe, and I was praying the darn thing didn’t fill up with water while I was in there. There were mobs everywhere, people screaming, and buildings on fire…” She started coughing.

  “Excuse me. It took almost a day to get out of there. Even then I was in the outer suburbs. I still had to watch my back. I slept in a ditch. I was so scared that I didn’t try knocking on anyone’s door to ask for a place to sleep.”

  Sheryl was down to the last bite on her plate. She kept it there as she continued. “So, that was my life until now. It got a little easier once I got away from civilization, but I still would find these bands of people. I ran into the woods. If I hadn’t had Jacob’s instructions to find water and things to eat, I’d be dead by now.”

  The campsite kept silent as Sheryl stabbed the last piece of food with her folk. “When I smelled your cooking, I thought I was going mad. I couldn’t believe I found someone cooking an honest to God meal. I certainly didn’t think it was my little brother!” With a laugh, she ate the last morsel.

  “Thank God we made it out here when we did,” Domino said.

  Jacob scratched the back of his head. “Sheryl, my house is only a couple of hours walk from here. I know you’ve been through a lot, but if you were following my map…”

  “I lost it when I ran into the woods,” Sheryl chimed in.

  “Okay, but you’ve been down Road 215, right? I just thought you would have seen my house if you were coming from the direction of the city,” Jacob said.

  “I did find your house.” Sheryl set the plate down. “Jacob, someone beat me there.”

  “What?” Jacob stood up.

  “I didn’t go to your house because someone else is already there,” Sheryl finished.

  Jacob clenched his teeth. He wanted to close his ears and not listen to what his sister was saying. Yet, all the same, he had to know what was going on with his house.

  “I knew they weren’t you or Domino or the kids.” Sheryl crossed her legs. “I didn’t dare go any farther. I just turned and ran back into the woods before they saw me. I was so terrified that I didn’t check to see if they were friendly or what.”

  “You did the smart thing,” Jacob said. “We’re in the same boat. We had to spend the night locked up in my truck because there were men outside scavenging the stalled cars from the road.”

  Sheryl chuckled. “That sounds just like you, Jacob.” Her smile quickly vanished. “Though, I wish to God you had been wrong all along.” She turned so that Domino was in her field of vision. She sounded both relieved and accusatory at once, as if the world had fallen to pieces precisely because they believed it might.

  Jacob let it pass. His sister had experienced horrors that he couldn’t have imagined. She would have a lot to adjust to.

  “How many people did you see in the house?” Jacob asked.

  Sheryl rubbed her chin. “I know I saw two. One of them was a man. There might have been a woman with him.”

  “Another family?” Domino asked.

  “I didn’t see any kids,” Sheryl said quickly.

  “Maybe, but the kids easily could have been inside and out of view.” Jacob paced in a tight circle. “In any case, I knew we were going to have to scope out the house before we walked up to the front door. Now we know someone else is in there. We’re going to have to recon these guys. If they are just regular people loo
king for a place to stay and eat, we might work something out with them.”

  Domino’s hand dropped down to her belt, her fingers grazing her gun. “For their sake, I hope they are friendly.”

  Chapter Six

  Jacob, nestled near the oak tree, stayed quiet. He was eager to see how Sheryl was interacting with her niece. She had taken off Jubilee’s bandage and was now examining the wound on Jubilee’s arm.

  She shook her head. “God, I only can imagine how it felt when it hit you. Are you still in any pain? How does it feel now?”

  “It aches, but not a lot. It was really bad a few days ago, but it’s been getting better. I sometimes forget about it,” Jubilee said.

  The wound still was stitched up, but it had healed so much in the past few days that it might be time to remove the stitches. Jacob remembered Doc Sam’s surgery on Jubilee’s arm. The memory of the dark red blood oozing from the wound as he pushed the arrowhead’s stump out of her arm sickened him. The doctor had worked calmly, removing the arrowhead, cleaning the wound, and closing it up with stitches. Jacob wondered how Sheryl would judge the work.

  “Skin’s looking healthy. No green area, no sign of deterioration or infection.” Sheryl’s assessment warmed Jacob. Jubilee’s arm did look a lot better, with only light red and pink surrounding the stitched area.

  Sheryl’s expression quickly darkened. “I can’t believe this happened to you. My God, who would do something like this? I know it was a horrible accident, but I just never have heard of people getting hurt this way.”

  Jubilee’s lips formed a crooked smile. “My dad calls them ‘redneck dumbasses.’”

  “Really?” Sheryl glanced over at Jacob. “You run into those guys a lot?”

  “Not really. We run into Alex Cowell a lot more, before the pulse hit us,” Jubilee replied.