Lifting the squirrel by the tail, John removed his Ka-Bar Becker BK9. The nine-and-a-quarter-inch length of the blade was overkill, but it was all he had at the moment. He began by slicing through the back of the tail, being careful not to cut all the way through the hide. Next he stepped on the creature’s bushy tail and pulled until the hide rolled off like a tiny fur sweater. Brandon looked on with disgust.
“I hope you’re paying attention,” John told him. “’Cause you’re doing the next one.”
After the squirrel was cleaned and gutted, Brandon did his best to emulate John’s technique. These were things he’d already taught his own children during many a camping trip in the past and it was important that Brandon learn the kinds of skills that might save him from starvation one day. Normally, as part of this process, John would have kept the guts to use as bait, but that wasn’t in the cards for today and so he tossed the remains into the woods. The hides he would keep, however, since furs could always be put to a variety of uses.
Later, when they were eating, Brandon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had something on his mind and so John asked him what it was.
“The lights have been off for a while now,” he said.
John nodded. “Going on five months, I’d say.”
“When do you think they’re gonna come back on?”
He figured it was the need for oil lamps that had prompted Brandon’s question. In the beginning, his own family had asked him nearly every day as though John somehow had the magic answer as to when things would return to normal. He’d told them he didn’t know, and that was exactly what he told Brandon now.
The kid grew pensive.
“You’re worried things might never go back to how they were, is that it?”
“No,” Brandon said, shaking his head. He was clutching a squirrel leg between two fingers as though it were a chicken wing. “I guess I’m worried mostly about what it’ll mean when things do.”
It was a simple, but startling question from a young man, the answer to which John hadn’t spent much time dwelling on. What would there be to go back to? That was what Brandon was really asking.
In the years leading up to the EMP, John and his wife Diane had slowly begun rebuilding everything they’d lost during the financial crisis. Their 401k, which had taken a serious beating, was starting to show signs of life. But in the modern age of electronic banking, what was money besides little ones and zeros in a computer server somewhere? It wasn’t backed by the gold in Fort Knox anymore. The truth was, the minute that bomb detonated in the atmosphere, the country’s entire financial sector had been completely wiped out. The $63,000 in savings they’d managed to scrape together was now little more than a memory. And the house they’d owned on Willow Creek Drive? They’d be lucky to return and find that it was still standing. The Applebys’ situation was even more dire given the way their house had disintegrated into a heaping pile of ash.
John worked the tough squirrel meat between his teeth and struggled to swallow it down. “Chances are better than none there won’t be a thing left for us when the lights finally come back on,” he said. “My guess is the population’s already been cut by at least half. On those rare occasions when I take Betsy on a scavenging trip down near the interstate, I see more and more bodies piling up along the shoulder of the highway. All these months later, people are still trying to escape the city. Like us, they thought they could weather the storm and when they realized they couldn’t it was too late.”
Brandon wasn’t eating anymore, although his jaw hung open as though he was getting ready to. Or maybe it was shock over what John was saying. There were tears forming at the corners of the boy’s eyes and this brought John to the entire reason he’d taken Brandon along in the first place. The kid needed to toughen up.
“I never did get around to telling you,” John began, “how proud I was of the way you helped defend the cabin when Cain attacked. I know your dad was too. Taking a man’s life isn’t to be taken lightly. Whether you like it or not, you became a man that day. Not because you pulled a trigger, but because you chose to stand up and fight when others might have curled into a ball. I know fourteen isn’t all that old, but times have changed.”
Brandon blinked away the tears.
“You understand what I’m saying?” John asked and Brandon nodded.
“Those dead you saw along the interstate,” the boy said. “You think they were from Knoxville?”
“Most likely. Why?”
“I was just wondering why the army wasn’t there to help any of them.”
It was a good point. By and large, John and the others had opted to lie low and stay out of sight, but even so, they hadn’t seen a single sign of the military.
“I suspect a bunch of them might have gone home to protect their families,” John said.
“That’s what I figured too,” Brandon replied, although John could sense the doubt in his voice.
Surely there was a reason they hadn’t seen so much as a single National Guardsman since bugging out of Knoxville and the possibilities only magnified John’s growing sense of unease.
The goose was squawking again and the sound snapped John out of his reverie. “All right, let’s get this stuff loaded up and get back to camp.” He opened the back hatch and they both slid the caged goose inside, along with the pellet gun.
Once in the driver’s seat, John set the AR between his seat and the console, the way he always did when driving. They left the lake and started out along the narrow gravel path which led through the forest. Branches scratched the sides of the truck as the goose in the back began kicking up a racket.
They cleared the path and came to the road. John slowed down and checked both sides of the road, first left and then right. It was an old driving habit that never went away, all these months later.
That was when he caught sight of Brandon staring off straight ahead. John followed his gaze and spotted thick fingers of smoke rising from a nearby hill.
“Think it’s a forest fire?” Brandon asked.
John hit the gas without answering. The smoke wasn’t from a forest fire at all. It was coming from their camp.
Chapter 3
An eternity seemed to pass as the Blazer roared through the valley toward the burning cabins. Brandon continued to monitor the trails of smoke rising into the air.
John’s heart hammered in his chest with fear and uncertainty. His mind was locked on the simple mission of getting there as soon as possible, although even as he did, another part of his mind, the one sharpened from years of military service, began to assess possible threats.
Had the fire begun accidentally? Out in the mountains with no access to a fire department, it was a constant danger. All eight of them had drilled on how to respond. John had even risked heading into Oneida to search for fire extinguishers before turning back when he saw a handful of armed men milling about. During their drills, he’d estimated there simply wasn’t enough time to pump water up from the thousand-gallon storage tank buried underground before a growing fire would consume both cabins and everything inside them.
Of course, there was another possibility coursing through the darker alleyways of John’s mind. This scenario involved the camp coming under attack. If that were the case, there would be a definite loss of life, a thought even he found too hard to bear.
Rocketing down Buffalo Road, John was coming on so fast he nearly overshot the turnoff. Gregory, Emma and Natalie had reset the false treeline camouflaging the entrance as John and Brandon had left. But something had since knocked it over again. The heavy pit of fear in John’s belly was turning to dread. It was beginning to look like his worst fear had come true.