Total Annihilation Read online

  He wasn’t sure if they’d be able to make any of the old, pre-insulin treatments work, but if the supply he and Josie were carrying spoiled en route, that old knowledge just might keep Alex alive. They met up about thirty minutes later, to compare.

  “The smart thing might be to wait until dark again, but we have no food, and you’re not looking so hot,” Josie said. “Looks like we’re at least on the right side of Boise to get to Carleton, and there’s woods on the way. If we can’t scavenge up any prepared food, we might stand a chance in the wild.”

  Chapter 18

  Roy had always insisted on taking Josie out to the range at least once a month when he wasn’t on deployment. She’d never had the heart to be really good at it, but was at least solidly competent.

  For the past few days, though, she’d found herself relying more and more on a firearm for her very life.

  She really wished she’d put more into it when she had the chance, especially now that she had to teach somebody else how to use a gun to survive.

  “You have the guns, right?” Josie asked.

  It was the first time either of them had mentioned the pistols.

  “Yeah,” said Ben.

  “You ever fired one?” Josie asked.

  “No, but for a while, after the breakout, I carried a police issue Glock that we took from one of the guards,” Ben said, unable to look Josie in the eye. “I never fired it, though.”

  “Let’s see them.”

  Ben showed Josie the two small pistols he had wrapped up in his change of clothes. One was a stainless Walther PPK/S in .380 ACP, and the other a Smith & Wesson Shield in 9mm. Both guns each had a spare magazine, but no holsters or mag pouches.

  Josie took the Shield for herself and stuffed it in the back of her waistband, leaving the PPK/S for Ben.

  “You’ve never shot one, but do you know how to operate it?” she asked Ben.

  Ben lifted the gun in his hands to examine it.

  “Sort of,” he said.

  “We’ll change that,” replied Josie.

  She showed Ben how to drop the Walther’s 7-shot magazine and clear the chamber in the event of a jam.

  “It looks like we’re clear in here for a while. Roy showed me some of the things he learned over in Iraq and Afghanistan. We find ourselves needing to use these, it’s best we both know what we’re doing. At least a little bit.”

  She handed the gun and the magazine back to Ben. “First thing, forget that stupid sideways-hold gangster crap you see in the movies. Hold it upright.”

  After showing him how to carry the pistol, with a proper two-handed grip and to keep it pointed at the ground before raising the aim to the target, she had him practice working the manual thumb safety and bringing it up, aiming, and dry firing until he could squeeze the trigger without jerking it.

  “It’s a start,” she told him. “It’ll be a lot different the first time it’s a person in your sights.”

  She left out the part about Ben being one of the people she’d learned that lesson with. “Next thing. How to make sure we don’t shoot each other.”

  Instead of trying to teach Ben all of Roy’s infantry hand signals that she could only barely remember, they practiced leap-frogging each other through the library stacks, finding ways that made sense to them to communicate without speaking.

  They decided that their best bet if it ever came to shots fired would be to make sure they always stayed within line of sight of each other.

  After an hour or so, they felt like they weren’t half bad at moving around without crossing each other’s lines of fire and took a break.

  “It’s been more than a full day since you’ve eaten, hasn’t it?” Josie asked, noticing how pale Ben was looking.

  “Yeah,” he murmured.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Could be better,” Ben said. “Got a little bit of an actual infection in it, but not bad. The doc got me on antibiotics right away, so I’m on top of it.”

  “I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to thank you enough for what you did to help me get out. What you’re still doing,” Josie said. “And you understand, I won’t thank you…um…that way, right?”

  Ben nodded. He was doing a real bad job of handling his emotions about a woman that got him into prison in the first place.

  Helping Josie and her family without getting entangled at all, emotionally or physically, was becoming his way to atone for what he’d done in a way that was much more real and meaningful than holding down a bunk in a prison cell.

  “Anyway,” Josie said, to move the subject to less awkward territory. “We really do need to get some water and food soon. Looking at the map, I think we can make Jon’s place today yet, if we don’t run into trouble on the way. It’ll be tough going without any food in us, but we both need water real soon.”

  As soon as the words were out, Josie felt a pang of guilt when she realized she was traveling with someone other than Alex. There’s no way they would have been able to press on like they had if they were traveling with an insulin-dependent, diabetic girl.

  No way she would have been able to even consider going two full days without any food at all. She said a silent prayer that whatever had happened at their old homestead, Roy had gotten Alex and her insulin out safely.

  “Do we want to see if any of the places nearby have anything?” Ben asked.

  Josie went over to one of the bookshelves nearest the front of the library and ducked down. “That apartment building over there looks like it’s reasonably intact. Windows aren’t busted out.”

  “Worth a try?”

  “I think so. If we can get in and onto one of the upper floors, let’s get some rest and lay low there, try to do the bulk of our travel tonight.”

  “Let’s do it,” Ben said, walking over to his bicycle.

  The two of them looked carefully up and down the street for a full minute before they dared leave the library. They had decided to just ride fast to cover the open area to the apartment building instead of going for stealth if the way looked clear.

  At the end of their sprint, just outside of the apartment building, they saw somebody come around the far corner of the structure.

  He was in dirty jeans and a t-shirt, wearing a ratty old ball cap, holding a rifle and pointed vaguely towards them.

  “Hands up,” the stranger said.

  When she took her eyes off the weapon in his hands and up to his face, Josie knew immediately what was on his mind, and she didn’t like it.

  She also flashed back to one of the many, many times she’d tried watching a movie with Roy that had a gun anywhere in it.

  The punk in front of her was holding his weapon down by his waist, and she could tell it wasn’t aimed directly at either her or Ben.

  She and Ben, both still straddling their bicycles, kept their hands on the handlebars.

  “I said hands up!”

  “Look,” Ben said. “We just got out of that camp up the road. We’ve probably got less than you do.”

  “You don’t got anything we want,” the stranger said. “She does.”

  That confirmed the look on his face for Josie and gave away more information than he should have.

  Josie and Ben both looked left, and saw two more men, also holding rifles casually, not at all covering her or Ben.

  They were too busy smirking and fantasizing about what they thought they were going to get from her.

  “I don’t make any trouble, you let him go?” Josie asked.

  She looked at Ben, darted her eyes to the stranger’s rifle, and then rolled them.

  Ben gave a very short, sharp nod. She hoped he understood her.

  “He don’t try to be no hero, sure,” one of the two men said.

  “Alright,” Josie said. “We’re getting off the bikes. We cool?”

  “Yeah, nice and easy, though” the first stranger said.

  “OK,” Josie said, adjusting her grip on the handlebars, and looking down at her feet to
put down the kickstand.

  While she was facing down and none of the three punks could see her mouth, she mouthed quietly to Ben, “On three, throw yours at the two, follow me.”

  “Got it,” Ben whispered back.

  As he and Josie stepped off the bicycles, she counted, “One … Two …”

  She planted her feet, and said sharply, “Three!”

  On cue, Ben swung his bicycle by the handlebars and hurled it at the two smirkers.

  Josie used her bicycle to shatter the patio door of the corner apartment, and threw herself in after it, while broken glass was still flying through the air.

  Ben followed, the sound of a gunshot in his wake.

  He and Josie bolted through the living room of the apartment to the front door.

  Josie unlocked it while Ben fired a couple shots behind her.

  As soon as she got the door open, she ran through, saying, “Close it behind you.”

  Ben followed her into the hallway, slamming the door behind him.

  Josie grabbed his arm as he tried to run past her, pulling him to a stop. She pointed down the hallway they’d come, to a security door just a dozen feet away that led outside, with a set of steps up to the second floor next to it.

  Then she turned and pointed to another one at the far end of the hallway.

  “Roles reversed, I’d have us split up and each take one,” Josie said, quietly.

  She saw the understanding dawn in his eyes, as he turned to face the far end of the hallway.

  It was dark inside the building, just a bit of thin light shining in from the narrow glass windows flanking the security doors.

  “We can see them coming, they won’t see us,” Ben said.

  “Exactly.”

  “You know, sweetheart, we would have let your friend go if you had kept your end,” somebody inside the apartment they’d just gone through said.

  “They’re trying to distract us,” Ben said, quietly.

  “Yep.”

  More inane chatter came from the apartment.

  “I’m going to get closer to the door, see if I can get a good shot,” Josie said.

  “Got you,” Ben said.

  Josie crossed the hallway, to where she could barely see a sliver of the window past the stairway if she hugged the wall.

  She started creeping along it, her Shield 9mm held up and out in front of her, sight picture right about where the middle of a man’s chest might be if he were standing upright.

  She was almost at the end of the hallway when she stopped and waited.

  It didn’t take long for her to see one of the men lean out from the concealment of the heavy security door to look in the window.

  She lifted her aim to the level of his face.

  She was sure it was too dark where she was for him to see her.

  The idiot inside the building kept talking. She paid him just enough mind to try and figure out if he was getting any closer to the door.

  Josie suddenly heard Ben whisper, “Apartment C!”

  She turned to look at him, pointing two doors down from the apartment she and Ben had come through, training his gun on the door.

  Ben crept right up to the door, gun at the ready. She could see the tension in him, as he kept himself pressed against the near wall, out of sight of the peephole in the door.

  She wanted to keep watching but had her own post to keep an eye on, so she turned back to the little bit of window she could see, covering both it and Apartment A, the one with the shouting man in it.

  Without warning, Ben kicked the door he was watching open ducked through it, and she heard two rapid gunshots.

  The face appeared again in the window beside the security door. Josie fired three rounds from her Shield in quick succession. She was able to keep a good sight picture as the first round shattered the glass window.

  Her second shot was underway while the man was still reacting to that, and the third hit him as he staggered backwards from the second bullet.

  “Got ‘em pinned!” Josie heard Ben shout, faintly from outside the building.

  Their plan of always staying within line of sight had already broken own. That reminded Josie of one of Roy’s old sayings: No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

  She had to think fast. If Ben had the stranger pinned, he probably wasn’t going to come through the apartment door at her.

  And getting back to the original plan didn’t sound like a bad idea. She took a tentative step towards the security door, and saw a body lying still just beyond it.

  She went through the door quickly, keeping her eyes up and off the ground.

  “Coming around, Ben,” she said as she neared the corner of the building, hopefully loud enough for Ben to hear her, but not anybody inside.

  She waved one hand around the corner quick, before peeking around it. Ben diverted his eyes from the window into the apartment just long enough to give her a thumbs-up, and point back inside.

  She could see the stranger inside, eyes focused intently in Ben’s general direction, not on her.

  She had just enough of an angle on him that she was able to get a clear shot.

  Again, she fired another quick three rounds and put him down. Knowing the Shield must be running low, she quickly reloaded.

  “This had to have attracted attention,” Ben said. “Food, water, and let’s ride?”

  “Yeah you get that, but I’m going to get us some upgrades,” she said, pointing towards the stranger’s rifle.

  Chapter 19

  Two days in, Roy felt like Jon had finally relaxed with him and Alex in the house.

  Sure, Jon had been happy to see his old buddy, but it was very clear on his face that a part of his mind was aware that there were now two more mouths to feed, even with the supplies Roy had brought.

  Even though Alex didn’t eat as much as an adult, they were still making a dent into Jon’s food supply. At least the water supply was holding steady.

  Jon had built a rain catchment system and had a good-sized cistern beneath the house.

  As soon as power had died and it was clear it was much more than a blown transformer, he topped the cistern off, as well as filling every sink in the house and the two bathtubs.

  Roy had to admit that Jon had put more thought into micro scale sustainability than he had.

  In addition to the cistern, up on the second floor, he’d installed a hydroponic system, using light tubes from the roof in lieu of energy-intensive grow lights.

  It wasn’t running full capacity without the more powerful artificial light, but it still gave him a reasonably steady supply of fish and fresh greens and vegetables.

  The house itself was of concrete brick construction.

  The “decorative” metal shutters outside that flanked each window were now closed. The fence around his yard was likewise concrete, and eight feet high.

  During more civil times, the top of the wall was smooth brick, but as soon as it was clear that it had all hit the fan, Jon had gone out and dropped long, thin nails, point-up, into the gaps between the decorative bricks atop the wall.

  Inside Jon’s garage was an old 1980s Chevrolet Suburban, old enough to not have the kind of electronics that would be vulnerable to an EMP.

  Roy hadn’t gone back for his Land Rover yet, as it was the kind of thing that attracted attention in a populated area. That vehicle was his last ditch holdout, in case he and Alex needed to get out immediately.

  Roy noticed there were half-walls and pass-throughs all over the place inside the house.

  His experience in setting up squad and platoon positions gave him an intuitive sense of a house interior built around the principal of defense in depth.

  Jon’s arsenal was also respectable. Not a lot of hardware, but there were a handful of concealable pistols, combat pistols, carbines, rifles, and shotguns in his safe.

  In addition, he had two compound bows and two crossbows.

  “See?” Roy asked, when Jon was giving him and Ale
x an initial tour. “You knew I was coming, so you got us matching everything.”

  The little joke then had put Jon a bit at ease, a trend that had continued over the next couple of days.

  It was very clear to Roy that his friend had started going a little bit loopy from literally not having talked to anybody in the weeks since what was now clearly an EMP.

  Jon had always been just a little bit of a loner, but not isolated. He seemed to need both social and solitary time.

  With their background as soldiers, Roy and Jon quickly settled into a routine together with Alex doing her best to be cheerful when she was awake.

  “Hey, think she’ll be good for a couple of hours while we take a stroll out?” Jon asked over dinner.

  “I’m pretty sure. She’s able to handle herself, and you’ve got this place pretty well set up, but…” Roy’s voice trailed off.

  He knew a good part of his reluctance to leave Alex alone was because of the way his own house had been suddenly overrun.

  The memory of the assault on his home and family, the lingering hearing loss and headaches from the flash-bang, the fact that his wife had been scooped up and was now who knew where all weighed on him.

  “It’s been pretty chill around here,” Jon said. “Most days, nothing comes past the house.”

  “I know,” Roy said. “But if anything happens to Alex, she crashes bad or something, she needs me here.”

  “Risk management, brother,” Jon said. “You’ve been here a few days now, and she’s been fine. Worn out, but nothing even close to an emergency. She’ll be fine for a few hours.”

  Roy shook his head, and before he could speak, Jon jumped back in. “Besides, I know there are fruit and nut trees around. The more good, fresh food we can get into her, the better, right?”

  It took another hour of convincing, but finally Jon got Roy to agree to tuck Alex into bed, so they could take a run out just after full dark.

  When the time came, Jon and Roy each carried a crossbow, with a compound bow slung over their shoulders, and a pair of combat pistols each.

  Roy carried his trusty Beretta and one of Jon’s Glock 19’s, while Jon carried two 19’s for himself.

  They kept it extremely quiet and unobtrusive for the first two blocks, until they were out of direct sight of the house.