Emp strike series book 3.., p.1
EMP Strike Series | Book 3 | Camp Defiance, page 1
part #3 of EMP Strike Series Series
Camp Defiance
EMP Apocalypse Survival Thriller - Book 3 of 4 in the EMP Strike Series
Bo Thunboe
Published in 2021 by Weston Press, LLC
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, organizations, places, events, or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Brian D. Moore
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-949632-13-2 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-949632-12-5 (trade paperback)
Weston Press, LLC
Naperville, IL
www.thunboe.com
Also by Bo Thunboe
EMP STRIKE SERIES
EMP STRIKE
CHAOS REIGNS
CAMP DEFIANCE
END GAME
JAKE HOUSER MYSTERY SERIES
WHAT CAN’T BE TRUE
HOWEVER MANY MORE
AS IT NEVER WAS
PAST MADE PRESENT
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Preview of END GAME, Book 4 in the EMP Strike Series
Acknowledgments and Author’s Note
About the Author
1
Dan woke quickly because waking slowly in the After could get you killed. He didn’t move, listening for the sound that woke him, a sound that shouldn’t be there.
Birds sang and chirped and a large insect buzzed and rapped against the window screen. The room was filled with light and a cool breeze pulsed through the open window and fluttered the lacy drapes. He waited, motionless, and finally found the sound underneath all the rest of them. Repetitive. A hard sound made soft by distance. The clop-clop of a shod horse on pavement. A sound that meant people.
He hadn’t even seen another human being in a week or talked to one in at least twice that long. Do I want to see these people?
He got up and looked out the window, standing back a couple feet to avoid being seen if someone happened to be out there. The sun was bright and the air warmer than any day before it so far this year. Flowers fighting through the weeds to bloom around the trees budding in front of this house filled the air with the fresh organic odors of spring. He looked up and down the street and saw nothing moving but a pair of squirrels chasing each other around the trunk of the oak tree out front, their claws scraping at the bark. He eyed the squirrels and thought about snaring them for fresh meat, but decided to investigate the sound before doing anything else. He dropped to his knees and leaned up to the gap in the open window and listened, tilting his head from side to side until he zeroed in on the sound; it came from the southeast. He used the toilet—his piss ringing against the hollow porcelain of the dry bowl, then put on his coat and shouldered his pack.
In the doorway he looked back at the soft bed and the dusky pink walls half covered by faded boy band and Star Trek posters. The room of a little girl on the edge of adolescence and looking forward to relationships and adventures. Where was she now, he asked himself, but then shook his head at the lie inside the question. She was dead. He doubted even one person in a thousand had made it through the first year after the Pulse.
He went down the stairs, out the front door, and stood in the deep shade of the front porch.
As dawn had approached the night before, he dropped off the railbed and down the slope to the flat land here in Cairo, Illinois. A little town at the southern tip of the state where the mighty Mississippi and Ohio rivers came together. He walked into town on a road marked as a “scenic byway” that displayed nothing but decrepit strip malls, boarded up businesses, and trash-strewn empty lots. When a black iron sign arched over a cross street announced the Cairo Historic Park District, he went that way to find a comfortable place to sleep. He saw no one and heard nothing but the sounds of the night: bugs twittering, wind rustling branches, and the scurries and scrapes of nocturnal animals.
A few blocks later he went left on a divided boulevard, the corner flanked by a pair of mansions historic enough to be marked with signs: the Magnolia on the left and the Riverlore on the right. Historic homes attracted attention from raiders and scroungers and travelers so he never slept in them and kept walking. A couple of blocks down he picked a wide brick two story with a big front porch. The door was unlocked and inside he found the typical evidence of scroungers at work. Upstairs, he picked the front bedroom. He opened the middle window of the three built into a bow so he could hear anyone coming. The bed was made and he carefully pulled the bedspread down to keep the dust in it and off the bed itself. He’d shucked his pack and coat and laid down, sighing loudly at the softness. He hadn’t slept in a bed—or out of the rain—in a couple of days and was glad for the change. He’d closed his eyes and fallen asleep almost immediately.
Now he descended the stairs to the brick walkway nearly obliterated by weeds and out onto the boulevard. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but it had been enough. His muscles felt rested and his mind clear. He eyed the shadows and decided it was somewhere around noon. He looked north, back the way he’d come, thinking of Mary and Erin and Sean and said his prayer for them and his prayer for himself. Please bring me home to them soon. If you have something you want me to do here on earth, a final test or task to help someone, please bring it to me soon. “Amen,” he whispered. He sometimes worried God had presented him with his test or task in one of the people he’d avoided over the last few years and he was now destined to wander until death sent him to hell. But if he believed that, there was no point. His test had to be in front of him. Today, or tomorrow, or a year from now. But somewhere ahead of him.
He went south on the boulevard, eyes and ears wide open, senses on full alert. The clippity-clop somewhere ahead of him, fading in and out as the sound bounced through town to find him. As he walked, he worked one of his stainless-steel water bottles out of the side pocket of his pack and drank it down while nibbling on a piece of dried fish from his pocket.
The street was lumpy cobblestone for a few blocks, then became asphalt and the homes less impressive and the cars littering the curb more decrepit. A few more blocks and the boulevard joined the main drag and became just like every other four-lane strip mall mecca in America. The smell of water and mud and decaying plant life started to crowd out every other smell as the two rivers closed in on him. The horse noise faded away and then went silent, but he kept moving.
Two massive limestone buildings rose above the decay—a post office and a U.S. Treasury Customs house—then he was in empty land. When he got to the intersection for the road heading over the bridge into Kentucky to the east, he saw horseshoe prints in dirt on the road with the parallel tracks of tires on both sides of them. The horse had been pulling a wagon.
The tracks crossed in front of him, coming from the bridge and heading south on the road his map said led past Fort Defiance Park and over the Mississippi River into Missouri and beyond. The route he’d planned to take on his way southwest to Arizona, or maybe New Mexico. One last road trip. But he didn’t have to see these people. He could backtrack instead. There was another bridge across the Mississippi not that far north of here.
But maybe these people would be worth a visit. Maybe he could eat a hot meal he didn’t cook for himself. Talk to someone other than himself. Learn what they knew about the lands ahead of him. He followed the tracks, ignoring the little voice niggling away at him that he should avoid these people. But his brain always issued that warning and not all people were dangerous. Wind whistled through the bridge structure off to his left and rustled the long grasses greening on the roadside and brought him the whinny of the horse from somewhere ahead.
“Look what we got here, boys.”
Dan spun, hand shooting under the hem of his coat to his dagger. I should have listened to myself. A man in camouflage emerged from the brush along the road, eight or ten more men appearing with him, all holding guns. Flensers! His gaze darted around for a way out, but he was surrounded. He slid the dagger back into its sheath and put his hands up, heart pumping hard, his body flushed with the tingling heat of an adrenaline rush. Then he noticed their guns were assault rifles and they wore real uniforms with matching military insignia. The first sign of the federal government he’d seen since the Pulse.
The man on the right stepped forward. A sergeant, sleeves rolled up to display massive forearms. His name tag read Garza. “You got any weapons on you?”
“Two knives. I didn’t know the army—”
“We’re marines.” Garza gestured and half his men faced away in different directions. The other half remained focused on Dan. Garza rested his hand on the butt of a black pistol in a ballistic nylon holster strapped to his thigh, shifting his feet to put his body in profile. “Drop the pack, pull out the knives, and hand them over.”
Dan shrugged off his pack and a corporal stepped forward and took it. Dan undid his belt, slipped his sheath knife off, and handed it over. Then he opened his coat to get at his dagger. He wore it upside down in a snug sheath with the handle at his waist so he could reach under his coat and pull it out. It hung from a strap made of seat belt material. He lifted the strap over his head and the corporal snatched it away. He whistled as he pulled the blade out of its sheath and showing it to his sergeant.
“Look at this thing!”
Garza looked at the knife, then at Dan. “That’s a Fairbairn–Sykes fighting dagger. Where’d you get it?”
The knife had been used to kill Dan’s son. He’d chased down Sean’s killer, taken the knife, and killed the man with it. But he wasn’t going to share that. He shrugged.
“That it for weapons?”
“I have a pocketknife I use for making tinder and cleaning my fingernails.”
“Let’s take it, Sarn’t. If he’s one of them that hit us in Kentucky, We—”
“He’s too old to be part of them.”
“We didn’t see them. One of them might could have been this old.”
The discussion went back and forth, the men worried he was part of some group that attacked them the day before in Kentucky. Garza let his men talk, his eyes on Dan. Dan stayed silent and didn’t move, acquiring as much information as they were willing to give up. More than half of them wanted to ‘waste’ him on the spot and Dan hoped Garza wasn’t into democracy.
When Garza raised a hand, his men all went silent. “You can keep your penknife.” Garza licked his lips. “Where’re your people?”
“I’m alone.”
“Where’re you coming from?”
“Up by Chicago.”
“You’ve walked that whole way?”
“I rode a bike for some of it.” But moving that quickly through the nearly empty world made him too noticeable to those few people who had survived. So he ditched the bike and walked at night and mostly along freight railroad tracks.
“Where you headed?”
“South and west. Somewhere warmer than Chicago.”
“You’ve been through a lot of country for a man alone.”
Dan said nothing.
Garza chewed his lip, looking Dan up and down.
“Sarn’t, we can’t take the chance he’s with them or some others.”
The sergeant’s hand tightened on his pistol and Dan’s heartbeat fluttered. This is it. He almost closed his eyes but decided to meet his fate head on. He stood straighter.
Garza took a deep breath, then released the pistol. “We’ll take him to camp and let the captain make the call.”
Dan almost collapsed with relief, surprising himself. Maybe he did care whether he lived or died. “I didn’t know there was a camp near here.” He’d walked through the one camp he’d been aware of on the way south, hoping to run into some people from his past, but it had been a desolate wasteland.
Garza gripped the rifle that hung on his sling. “Walk.”
Dan walked, the marines in two columns, one on each side of the road with Dan and the sergeant in the middle of the road between them. They went south with the wagon tracks and cut left onto a gravel road that led into the park he’d been planning to visit. They stepped through a gate in an eight-foot tall chain-link fence, the sergeant exchanging a few words with the guards there who looked Dan over.
Beyond the fence the land stretched flat, trees planted at regular intervals as if someone had started a nursery. Noises started to emerge from the background, metal striking metal, a man yelling, two women laughing, a high-pitched scream that broke into laughs and giggles.
Children!
The trees fell away and the camp appeared. Four rows of desert camouflage tents, each about twenty by thirty feet with thirty feet between them. Sandbags stacked three feet high along the outside walls of the outer rows. As he approached, Dan could see from the people visible around them that the two rows of tents to the left were allocated to military personnel and across a fifty-foot gap the two to the right to civilians. He found the children in the bustle of people—so many people!—running around a tree, playing tag, squealing with laughter. The sound made him smile. He got a rifle barrel in his back and walked faster.
Garza cut left toward the river before they got to the tents and walked him down that edge of the camp. How many people lived here, he wondered. Four tents in each row. Eight tents of marines and eight tents of civilians. There was no telling how many people lived in each tent, but the settlement felt prosperous, robust. Marines lounged on picnic tables in the sun outside each tent, some cleaning rifles, others sharpening knives. They all looked fit and healthy and well fed. Every single one of them eyed Dan as Garza marched him past. “Catch a spy, Garza?” Garza didn’t answer the shouted question, but it shot another spike of adrenaline into Dan’s system. I’m not a spy, he wanted to shout. I’m just a traveler!
2
Helen sat at the head of the table, the six other women silent and staring at her, waiting for her to answer her own question. But she already knew what she thought. She wanted a different take on things. Push back. Debate.
“No one has a thought on getting some control over our own lives?” They looked around the table at each other, one woman finally raising her hand. It stopped at her shoulder, she was too timid to get it over her head. These women had to have been more assertive back in the Before, but the Pulse and the plague and the atrocities in the After had changed them. It had changed everyone, and usually not for the better.
“Go ahead, Jessica.”
Jessica pulled her hand down, ran her eyes around the table, then said, “The company saved us.”
“No one disagrees with that, Jessica.” The company had saved them all, including Helen and both her sons by wiping out the men chasing them and letting them stay in the camp. So she understood the gratitude, felt it—owed it—more than anyone.
“If Major Darby hadn’t welcomed us as his guests here, we would all be dead.”
Guests! “We all appreciate what the company did for us and are grateful for it. But we never agreed to subject ourselves to Darby’s control forever. We should be governing ourselves, making our own rules, deciding for ourselves who works what jobs and when and for how long and in which tents people in our community live.” The civilians outnumbered the sixty marines three-to-one, but the entire camp, even the civilian side, was still run by Darby, through the company commander, Captain Bell..
