Bug Out (6 page)

CHAPTER 12

Grace, Anna and the Tiller family spent the rest of the day and the night in the bunker.  Mr. Tiller had heard the reports about the drone attacks from Dukes and had also heard ‘chatter’ about another nuke going off in the US somewhere.  Out of a sense of protection against the unknown, he had shut his family and the girls in the bunker until he thought it was safe to surface.

Mrs. Tiller had a worried look about her the entire time.  Joshua’s younger brother was out of town on a trip; they had not heard from him since everything went south.  Once they shut the doors, there was a sense of finality about his whereabouts.  Mrs. Tiller sobbed quietly for a few hours until it was time to check on Anna’s bandages.  The task took her mind off of the potential loss of her son.

<  >

“What’s his name?” Anna asked.

“Adam,” Violet responded.  “He was named after my father.”

“How old is he?” Anna continued to ask questions in order to help distract the distraught mother.

“He turned sixteen on Halloween last year,” she said. 

“I don’t know anyone with a birthday on Halloween,” Anna said.  She was distracting herself from the loss of her parents as much as she was distracting Violet.

“Up stairs,” Violet started.

“Yes.”

“You said that your parents are both doctors?”  She was careful not to ask the question in the past tense.

Anna nodded.  “My Dad is a general surgeon and my Mom is a cardiologist.”

“Wow!  And you’re the only child?”

“Yes ma’am,” Anna felt the emotion of loss pushing at the backs of her eyes.

“Do you have a knack for medicine?” Violet asked.  “Like your parents?”

Anna thought about that for a minute. 

Grace was listening quietly to the conversation.  She had known Anna for along time, and she was always a better student at biology and science than Grace.  Anna had been fighting against her parents to go into a pre-med major once she went to college next fall, but Grace knew that Anna was only pushing back the way teenagers do.

Anna looked at the lady; she had come to an important realization during the short conversation.

“Yes, ma’am, I do have a knack for medicine.  I was thinking about becoming a pediatrician,” Anna surprised Grace by responding the way she did.

“I think that is a very noble profession…the care of our children,” Violet said, suddenly proud of the girl.  “I used to work in an ER.  I can teach you what I know, if you like?” Violet offered kindly.

<  >

Now, 8 hours later, Graced flipped on the two-way radio again, but it was no use, the metal and concrete walls of the 1950’era bunker were too thick to penetrate, she was only wasting the batteries.  She had thought through everything that she had ever learned from her parents, and ‘changing the plan’ wasn’t one of those things.

“What does that even mean…changing the plan?” She asked Anna.  “I don’t know what to do.”

“What if it’s not safe at your house anymore,” Anna offered.  She was sleeping on the bottom bunk of a pair of beds that the Tillers had put there for their boys and any ‘friends’ that might be here when they had to close the bunker door.

“Then I should go to her and help,” Grace shot back.

“She obviously doesn’t want that,” Joshua said, interjecting himself into the conversation.  He was sitting on his own bunk, three feet away from the girls.

Grace was conflicted with Joshua.  Under normal circumstances, she might have passed him off as a country redneck farmer. But there was something different about him.  He was 19 years old, very well educated, smooth in the way he communicated and was kind of easy on the eyes.  But, this was the end of the world, her mother was in life-threating danger and she had no idea if her father was even alive.  Oh, and she had shot two people the other day.  That little detail kept cropping up in her mind, never really leaving her alone.

“So, Joshua, how are you to know what my mother wants?” Grace retorted.  
That wasn’t the way I wanted that to come out.

Joshua nodded, kind of poking a lower lip out as his head bobbed.  “Well…”

Oh my God, he’s actually going to answer that! 
Grace thought.

“…when a foal has a new colt, there’s nothing that can keep a mother from that baby.  I mean, we have to take extreme measures if we ever separate a colt from the mother,” he paused to think through the rest.  “But if she feels that the colt will be in more danger if it tries to come to her, she will stop trying.”

“Wow,” Anna said, drinking in what he was saying.

  “But, it’s almost just as bad for the colt,” he continued.  “If that colt even senses that its mother is within reach, it will do amazing things in order to reach her.  So,” he looked at Grace, “I’m just speaking from that perspective.”

Anna looked away from Joshua and to a point on the wall above his head.  She could almost sense what Grace was thinking.  They had been friends for more than five years, and except for the end of the world prepping, Rambo shooting people thing with Grace, she felt she knew what the girl was thinking when it came to boys.  She was falling for Joshua.

“So, when do you think your father’s going to let us out of here?” Grace totally changed the subject.

“I guess when he feels that it’s safe.”

“So, what is safe anymore?” Anna offered.

“We could ask him,” Joshua answered, hopping off of his bunk.

The three teens made their way to where Mr. Tiller was working the knobs on a short-wave radio.

“How come his radio works and yours doesn’t?” Anna whispered to Grace as they walked over to him.

“His is a different technology, a lot more powerful and the antenna is located outside of the bunker,” Grace remarked, drawing off of her parents prepping knowledge.

  Bob Tiller had a set of noise canceling headphones connected to the feed and didn’t hear them approach.

“Dad,” Joshua touched the man’s shoulder and he jumped.

“Yes! Yes?”

“What’s the latest?  We’ve been down here for almost 20 hours and we kind of want to know what’s happening up top.”

Bob Tiller removed the headphones and turned towards the youth.  “I’m not going to be mellow dramatic or sugar coat anything.”

“Good, that helps me,” Grace said, cutting him off.

“Yes, well, it seems that there are several things happening that we need to prepare for.”  Mrs. Tiller joined them in the group, the worried look had returned to her face.

“My friend Dukes, down near Columbus, GA, has an operative moving towards Birmingham.  The operative reports that helicopters and drones are carrying out seek and destroy sorties.  The operative also reported that the signature of the helicopter was not one of ours.”

“What does that mean, Dad, not one of ours?  You mean it was a foreign county…for sure?”  Joshua asked the question that Grace wanted to.

“That’s what the operative reported.” Bob could see the doubt on the kid’s faces.  “He’s a former Army Captain, so he probably knows what he talking about when it comes to helicopters.”

“My Dad’s a Captain,” Grace commented, more to herself, than to anyone else.

“Really?”  Bob, asked more out of respect than of question.

“Yeah, he was ROTC in school and then did like 6 or 8 years active duty before going into the real world.”

“Your father’s not in Columbus, GA is he?” Bob asked, taking a shot in the dark.

“No,” Grace said, suddenly caught off guard by the question.  “He was flying home from Texas the night the bomb went off.”

Bob looked at her as if he was trying to puzzle something out.  “Would he have connected through Atlanta?” Bob asked.

Grace thought about that for a second.  Her father always flew through Atlanta.  It was how they accumulated as many air miles as they did for use when they went on vacation.  The extra short hop from Birmingham to Atlanta was a segment builder and added miles for her dad.

“I think so,” she answered.

“Interesting,” Bob said, as he swiveled back to the radio and keyed the mike.  “Birmingham Bob to Dukes, looking for response.  Over.”

Almost immediately, Dukes answered the call. 

“Bob, this is Dukes. Over.”

“Hey Dukes, code.  Over.”  Which meant that they were now speaking some sort of jargon or code that they agreed upon. 

“10-4.  Over.”

“Your operative in the field.  Were did he come from?”

There was a long pause on the short-wave radio.

“Level of importance?  Over,” Dukes stalled.

“He’s stalling,” Bob Tiller said to the others.  “He must know that there’s something special about this operative and he doesn’t want to broadcast to me what that is.  He’ll come up with something.”

Grace felt something in the pit of her stomach.  Something that she hadn’t felt since this entire ordeal had started.  She felt hope.

“We’re just fishing here, but we might have a mutual link…one of his assets,” Bob said, going out on a limb.  He pulled short of asking for a name on the unsecure channel.  “Over.”

Dukes surprised them by speaking plain code.   “First name, Ian, second three letters are Bravo, Uniform, Romeo.”

Everyone looked back at Grace, who was doing the translation in real time.  “He knows my Dad!” she said, her voice rising on the word dad.  “Ian Burrows.  That’s my Dad, Ian Burrows!  It has to be!”

Mrs. Tiller put her arm around the shoulders of the girl to get her to not cling too tightly to the hope.  “His name is Ian Burrows,” she said to Mr. Tiller.

Bob went out on a limb.  “Dukes, Burrows? Over.”

“Affirmative,” Dukes confirmed.

<  >

Leah was listening to the broadcast on her own short-wave radio and nearly fell out of her chair as she jumped up to hug Amy. 

“Ian’s alive!  Ian’s alive!  Ian’s alive!” she yelled as the two women jumped and hugged each other.  “And he said we have one of his assets…they have Grace!  They have Grace!”

<  >

“But he missed his scheduled radio check in with me two hours ago,” Dukes reported somberly.  “Over.”

CHAPTER 13

“What happened to your Scoutmaster?” Ian asked, as he assessed who and what was around him.

There were five Boy Scouts, all of different rank and age.  Each one wore varying versions of the Boy Scout uniform, but each one was a Boy Scout.

“He died,” the tallest one said.

“He what?” Mary responded, still out of breath.

“It doesn’t matter, lets get off this bridge.”  Ian stood and started moving one direction. 
This is not the way I wanted to cross this river.
  He looked back and noticed that the boys weren’t moving.

“Come’on guys, we’ve got to go!  This flood might get bigger and take out this bridge,” Ian warned.

Two of the boys started arguing.  One of the boys, the smallest, stating crying and the other two just bickered.  Mary stood just behind Ian; she wasn’t leaving without him.  This was becoming habit…Ian saves her from certain death and then she follows him.

Ian raised his hand, his fingers forming the Scout symbol for order and silence.  The boys responded immediately.  Each boy stopped what they were doing and raised their right hands, imitating the sign.  The only sound was the roar of the churning water below them.

“Look, fellas, I am an Eagle Scout, and an adult. I pull rank and now order the troop to follow me to this side of the river,” Ian said, and began to walk.

Four of the five began to walk after him, but one held back.  He was the oldest and the only one with the rank of Life Scout…one below Eagle.

“Sir!” he said loudly and sharply.

Ian turned around to look at the only person still standing in the middle of the bridge. 

“Our Scoutmaster’s body is on the other side and up that hill,” he said, the pain in his voice evident.

Ian looked at Mary.  “Take them off the bridge and as far up the hill as you can.  We’ll be there in a minute.” 

Mary nodded and swooped her arms around the remaining four boys.  “Alright, you heard the bad-ass Eagle Scout, let’s get off the bridge and see how high we can climb.”

“That’s a cool looking rifle,” Ian heard one the younger boys say to Mary as they hurried off the bridge.

Ian moved back down the bridge, mindful of the giant debris field that was moving down stream.

“Sir, our Scout Master is up that hill a little way.  He’s…he’s,” the boy cleared his throat.  “He’s a good man, and I don’t want to leave him up there.  We’ve been out here for three days.”

“What happened?” Ian asked, as he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“We all took a day off of school.  It was supposed to be fun and edgy, you know!  We all thought it was cool to skip school on Friday and go camping.  It’s a tradition with our troop.  Every year on this weekend, we take off on a Friday morning.  Not everyone gets permission to skip school, so it’s usually a small group.  We pack light and go deep in the woods.”

“Okay, so what happened?”  Ian kept looking up steam at what was coming down stream. 
We need to get off this bridge.

“Mr. McClure just fell over.  It was Friday, about 5:30PM.  We had hiked for about four hours.  We had reached where we wanted to camp, and he just fell over.  We could tell it was a heart attack…he had a pace maker and we all knew that.  We did CPR, but nothing worked.  He was gone.”

“He had a pacemaker?” Ian confirmed.

“Yes, sir.”

“And it stopped working.”

“I think so.”

“It has taken us this entire time to hike his body back to this point.”

Ian looked at where he thought the boys had left the body of the man.  He then changed his gaze back to the eyes of the boy.  He really was more of a young man than a boy. 
He’s probably just a bit younger than Grace.

“Do you guys know what’s been going on in America for the last two days?”

The boy looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

“No sir, other than that big celebrity trial.”

Ian smirked at that piece of trivia.

“Son, you are the Platoon Leader,” it was a statement, not a question.  “I need you to understand what I am about to tell you, and then help me lead the rest of your troop out of here.  Do you understand?”

The boy, about sixteen years old, nodded that he did understand.

“Good.”  Ian took a deep breath.  “America has been attacked,” he waited for a reaction, and there was none other than understanding.  “Atlanta was hit by a nuclear bomb and the rest of the country was hit by an EMP.  Do you know what an EMP is?”

The boy nodded.  “Yes sir.  An EMP is an electro magnetic pulse that renders all electronic devices useless that rely on a microchip for intelligence.  Which explains why all of our LED flashlights quit working.”

Ian nodded.  “Very good, now, it would seem that your Scoutmaster might have been struck by the same EMP, and his pacemaker was damaged.”

“That makes sense, sir,” the boy responded.

“Do you think it is logical for us to save the rest of the troop and head that way,” Ian pointed to where Mary had taken the other Scouts, “knowing what you know and that it’s probably what your Scoutmaster would have wanted?” Ian said, doing a little psychobabble on the youth.

“Yes, sir,” the young man responded.  “We can come get him after everyone is safe, right?”

Ian patted the boy on the shoulder.  “What’s your name, son?”

“Adam, sir.  Adam Tiller.”

“Well, Adam, I hope so,” he said.  “Now, let’s get off of this damn bridge!”

“Yes, sir!”