Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1) (57 page)

Denny called to him, but his calls were shrouded in the barrage.

“Denny, help.”

“Morgan, come towards my voice.”

“Denny, I’m all shot up.”

“Morgan!”

The shots subsided, if but for a moment, giving Denny the opportunity he needed to save Morgan.

He ran over to Morgan and grabbed him by the back of the chest rig he was wearing and pulled him into the cubby.

“I can’t breathe, Denny,” Morgan gurgled.

“You’re talking, that means you’re breathing.”

Denny knew Morgan was in bad shape. There were several bullet holes in his body and blood was streaming out beneath him.

Denny had Morgan resting on his lap, with his rifle pointing towards the door.

The door was kicked open by the UN soldiers that were on the other side and following them was another barrage of bullets. They came running into the room, but only one was shooting at Morgan and Denny. The gunshots seemed to be slowing as Denny took Morgan’s rifle and shot at the lead soldier that had kicked the door open and ran in first.

The other soldiers were being shot at from outside of the room. Denny was unsure if he had caught any bullets and was too consumed with adrenaline to stop and figure it out.

One by one, guns stopped shooting. The man that was firing on Morgan and Denny was dying on the floor.

“Don’t shoot. I’m coming in,” a familiar feminine voice said.

“They’re all dead,” she said as she stepped into the room, throwing the breathing apparatuses of the four UN troops Denny could not see onto the floor and into the lit area just outside of his cubbyhole where Denny was hiding.

The lady couldn’t see who was in the room. She went back to the UN troop that had the lighting accessory on his pack and took it off. Carrying it back into the room, she used her left hand to guide the light, and her right hand to hold her pistol.

Denny was confident that Morgan was dead by now. He had his left hand over his chest feeling for a rising chest, but there was nothing. Keeping Morgan’s weapon trained on the light that was approaching him, he felt Morgan’s carotid artery. Morgan was dead.

The light peeked around the corner of the room and lit up Denny’s face.

His left hand now up to block the piercing light, he said, “If you’re here to kill me, get it over with. I’m hungry.”

“Denny?” the woman said.

Setting the light down onto the floor, it now shone upon the white ceiling, reflecting enough light into the area for Denny to see the lady who had just saved his life.

“Tori?”

Bicentennial Park, Indiana, December 13

Rory Price had made the decision to stay behind. The trek from southern Illinois to northwest Indiana was a long one, but all the talk of deviating off of the current mission objective and into South Dakota was not in his plans. He was missing his wife and daughter severely, and it now seemed in vain that he had traveled this far to save Americans from certain annihilation at the hands of tyrannical domestic and foreign enemies. He kept hearing rumors of a classified mission and the thought of unknown objectives didn’t sit right with him.

Charles Buchanan and John James had left the afternoon before, for their mission to South Dakota. Rory was sitting against a pine tree, in the frigid northern air breeze, reading his Bible and searching for direction through a silent prayer.

He often found that God never spoke to him in a loud audible voice, but with soft impressions that always seemed to line up with the teachings of his Bible. This morning was no different, except he was cold and found it hard to focus on any one thing, like prayer or reading.

As he sat against that pine tree, he thought of home, the old ways, and the simple life. That train of thought took him to a life in captivity, a life without freedoms that he wasn’t willing to just lay down and forget about. His next thought was of the people, like Jess, who had been captured by UN forces and rounded up like cattle. Most of them were not as fortunate as Jess. They weren’t rescued by resistance fighters or let go by a change of heart, but they were sent north, into the unknown, into unthinkable possibilities.

Rory came to his decision.

With a deep breath and a loud sigh, he stood up and pulled out the compass that one of Buchanan’s Marines had given him.

Rory was assigned by Buchanan to be the chaplain of the group. It was an honor he gratefully accepted. The Marines came to like and to trust Rory as a capable fighter and man of God—two descriptions some had problems reconciling. The issue was as clear as night and day to Rory. He even gave a Bible study to the Marines he was with on one of the Ten Commandments, “
Thou shalt not kill
.” He took them to the original Hebrew word for
kill
, which is
ratsach
, and explained how the true definition of the word is not as broad as the English definition. In Hebrew, the commandment is best rendered “
Thou shalt not murder
.” The killing that was going on wasn’t murder if done in self-defense. Rory’s Bible study relieved quite a bit of anxiety for the men who had a heavy conscience. Rory explained to them that Jesus never would have requested his disciples to have swords for anything other than self-defense. His Bible studies touched many people, and one of them saw fit to give Chaplain Rory Price a token. The token was the compass. To Rory, it was more than a gift that pointed north, but, like the Bible, if he stayed true to its direction, it would lead him in the right direction.

The same Marine that gave him the compass showed him how to use it with a map. He opened the map he was given and laid it upon the ground. Using rocks to hold down the four corners, he did as he was taught. He laid the compass flat upon the map, being careful to line up the straight edge of the compass with the north-facing arrow of the map. Then he rotated the map until the compasses arrow was facing magnetic north. Then Rory located the GN and made adjustments. Using his straight edge, he drew a line from his position, in Bicentennial Park, to Goose Island, Chicago. With that reading, he adjusted the dial, and began his trek to Chicago, Illinois.

Camp Parks Army Reserve Forces, Dublin, California

Sergeant Briggs, along with the men and women of his Army Reserves unit, had gathered several hard drives laden with terabytes of data. Unfortunately, the small North Korean EMP attack rendered every electronic gizmo in California useless. It wasn’t that the data on the hard drives were corrupted, it was the fact that they couldn’t find a working computer.

Camp Parks had running water and electricity, until it was discovered that the Reservists weren’t responding to the orders issued by President Adalyn Baker during the first days of the Flip. Most of the Reservists left to join up with the UN command when they figured out they would be numbered with the resistance and have to go without a supply of life-saving water and food. Years before the Flip, California was suffering from liberal takeover of natural water supplies. The politicians continually wrote legislation allowing upwards of seventy percent of California’s natural water supplies to run off the mountains and into the deltas to save the fish. Sergeant Briggs didn’t find any humor in the fact that most of those politicians were now without water or, worse, dead. Like most other elected officials, they were rounded up and reintegrated with
the people
, where they found their final resting place somewhere other than a cemetery of their choosing.

“What else do we have?” Sergeant Briggs asked Specialist Felicia Edwards.

“Instruction manuals for Door Marking, Relocation Protocol, Consumer Intake—the list goes on and on.”

“Is there anything on the power outage?”

“Nothing. It’s like we were ghosted by a secret weapon.”

“I’m starting to wonder if that’s not the case.”

“Seriously?”

“Think about it. Nothing electronic works. We huffed it back to the camp from the pen and nothing electronic between there and here was operable. What else could do that? I mean, if they killed the power, it wouldn’t have affected the cars or our radios.”

“Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they drop a bomb. No pun intended.”

“It wouldn’t make sense to EMP yourself, though.”

“My ex-husband was a geek about this kind of stuff. He spent so much money prepping for doomsday that he tended to neglect other financial matters. It’s why we divorced. One time he made this cabinet thingy called a, uhh…” The word was escaping Felicia’s memory.

“A Faraday cabinet?”

“That’s it!” she said excitedly. “I was like, whatever!”

“If only you had been a believer.”

“He lives, or lived, about a half hour from here. Maybe the stuff he kept in that cabinet can be of some use to us?”

Felicia saw James’s face light up at the idea.

“That would be great, but I have one question. By a half hour you mean driving for a half hour?”

“Well, let’s grab our rucks and get moving.”

Nathan, Jess, Anders, and Henderson made it safely out of the Biocontrol zone and back to the bivouac area where they had concealed their vehicles and equipment.

Nathan, remembering that Blake had exposed them to an unknown sickness that was ravaging the area, made the decision to stay isolated from the others until he was confident they were not contaminated. The last thing he wanted to do was to wipe out everybody with a bioweapon that they could not defend against.

It was now late morning and they were awakened by the sounds of laughter. Nathan and Jess maintained their body heat by sharing the same sleeping bag. It was a tight fit, but southern Illinois winters were nothing to trifle with.

Nathan was lying still and listening to the Marines telling jokes and cutting each other down with insults. Nothing had changed since his time in service. The Marines were still a brotherhood, and while many non-Marines found it difficult to understand the esprit de corps, theirs was a brotherhood that bound them unto death.

Jess’s head was nestled against Nathan’s chest. The way they embraced one another as they slept was not only necessary to survival, but was heartwarming. Nathan couldn’t see that Jess’s eyes were open, but her embrace was enough for him to know she was awake.

“Did they wake you with their laughter?”

“No, I was already stirring a bit.”

“Are you about ready to get organized? We have missing friends in that town.”

“Yeah, I guess. How much did we lose last night?”

“You mean people and equipment?”

“No, weight! Of course people and equipment.”

Nathan gave her a squeeze for being sarcastic. “I think we lost six HMMWVs and seventeen men. That’s not counting the ones we were separated from. Denny’s in there somewhere and we have to find him.”

“We’re going to have to go in together, yet separate, if we’re to keep from exposing the others.”

“I know. About that, how do you feel? Do you feel any different?”

“Not really,” Jess said as she began pulling up and out of the sleeping bag.

Once Jess was exposed to the frigid morning air, she took in a deep breath and that shocked her lungs, causing her to cough.

Everybody that was apart from them stopped what they were doing to look at her.

“Relax, it’s just a cough,” she said.

About the time Ash saw that she was awake, he walked within ten feet of Nathan and Jess.

“Where’s Denny?” he asked.

Nathan sat up to join Jess. “I don’t know. Denny came to our aid yesterday and ended up getting hit with some kind of energy weapon that punched a hole through a brick storefront wall. It almost killed everybody. I was saved by a couple Recons and I grabbed Jess. I lost Denny in the rubble and the fog of combat.”

“I never got to thank him for saving me.”

“Yeah, well, if you were to find out what he had to do to save you, you might not be thanking him.”

“Typical Denny stuff, eh?”

“For sure.”

“I thought you guys might be hungry, so I brought you a couple MREs.” Ash threw them to Nathan.

“Thanks, man. This is how I remember the Corps.”

“How’s that?” Jess asked.

“Waking up in frigid temperatures and eating frozen food that was prepared over a decade prior.”

“I just lost my appetite.”

Nathan smiled at her and stood up. He began packing his belongings and taking inventory of everything he had. When he was done, he looked at the train track and noticed the train was gone. Calling over to one of the Marines, he asked, “What time did the train head out?”

“It headed out last night, sometime during all the shooting.”

Nathan looked back at Jess and said, “There has to be a loading area or some kind of zone where they’re putting people on that train.”

“You’re not thinking about going back in there, are you?”

“I already told you, Denny’s still in there and I’m not leaving without him.”

“I get so sick of all your
Semper Fi
.”

“Are you coming?”

“Well, somebody’s got to pull you out of the rubble. Might as well be me.”

While they were packing their belongings, the others were watching them. None of them seemed to be doing anything that would give the appearance of a search and rescue mission. Nathan stopped long enough to look at them and asked, “Are any of you guys coming? We have men in there.”

Ash stepped forward and said, “We were going to push through with the heavies. We just kind of figured that anybody else that was in there still was probably dead.”

“Are you serious? We have all this meat and we’re going to just
push through
?” Nathan yelled, pointing at all the Marines and national guardsmen.

“Listen,” Ash said, “I heard the guys talking about what was going on in that town. It’s infected with something. Prolonged exposure could contaminate all of us.”

Jess looked at Thor, who had just walked up to Ash and kneeled by his side.

“What about Thor?” she asked. “He’s been walking freely around the camp, probably being petted by everybody. Have you had an eye on him this whole time? Is he carrying any contagion?”