CyberStorm (36 page)

“Should be back anytime, depending on how far he got.” Chuck raised his eyebrows. “
If
he comes back.”

Chuck had half an idea that Tony might try to take off and drive down to Florida, where his own mother was.

Just then we heard the growl of an engine. Reflexively, Chuck reached for the shotgun propped up on the woodpile, but then relaxed. It was the sound of
our
truck. Tony was back.

I laughed. “
If
he comes back, huh?”

“You boys heating that up for me?” came a singsong voice as the deck door slid open.

It was Lauren.

She laughed as she looked at us, self-consciously rubbing the stubble on her head.

When we arrived the night before, after calming Chuck down, we all stripped down and left our lice-infested clothes in a pile at the side of the front deck, dressing in whatever new clothes we could scrounge from the closets inside.

We all shaved our heads too, even the girls.

“This is just for you, baby,” I laughed, banging on the side of the hot tub. It was the first time in my life that I’d shaved my head, and I rubbed my sweaty, bald pate and smiled at her.

Luckily, the hot tub had been covered and was still full of water when we’d arrived. There was no water pressure coming up from the city pipes snaking up the side of the road, and filling it from the trickle coming down the stream would have taken forever.

We weren’t heating the hot tub to lounge around in, but for cleaning. Chuck had done an inventory in the cellar, and the chlorine tablets for the hot tub were still there, so we were super-dosing the water to try and clean our clothes, and ourselves.

Around the front of the house, I could hear the truck crunching across the gravel in the driveway, and then the engine switched off.

A car door opened and slammed shut.

“We’re back here!” I yelled.

After a few seconds Tony appeared in the dappled sunlight at the side of the cabin.

He looked comical. Tony was a few inches taller, and quite a bit meatier, than Chuck, so the clothes in the closets barely fit him. The jeans were two inches too short, and way too tight, and the jacket and T-shirt were much too small. Combined with the freshly shaved head, he looked like an escaped convict on vacation.

He saw us smiling at him, and he laughed.

“I feel like I’ve joined a cult—shaved heads, hiding in the mountains.”

“Just don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” sniggered Chuck, nodding toward the hot tub. He leaned down and closed the door to the woodstove, now burning hotly.

Luke saw Tony. He ran over, and Tony reached down, catching and picking him up.

“Everything good?”

Tony nodded. “Lot of people down there, and I didn’t want trouble, so as soon as we got near his place on the main road he just jumped out.”

“You see anything?” asked Susie. “Talk to anyone?”

“Nobody’s got any power, no cell signal. I didn’t want to risk stopping and talking, not by myself.”

There were no radio stations that we’d found to tune in to up here and, obviously, no outside meshnet or cell networks. Being here was infinitely better than being stuck in the death trap of New York, but we found ourselves cut off from what little connection we’d had before to the outside world.

We’d left the generator in the apartment—it was too heavy to carry—so the only way we had left to generate electricity was the truck. Chuck had plugged all our phones into the cigarette charger, so they were all charged up. We could use the phones to communicate with each other, as a mini-meshnet, and they were still useful as flashlights and for the survival guides.

“So what’s the plan?” asked Tony.

Chuck looked at him.

“Let’s get cleaned up, do some washing, get an inventory of what we have—and relax. Tomorrow we’ll head over to our neighbors down the road, see how things have been here.”

“Sounds good. One thing though—I think the muffler is loose, probably from landing tail-first in the snow.” He smiled. “That was pretty spectacular.”

“I’ll go get the tools from the cellar,” I said. I knew a thing or two about cars. “I’ll have a look.”

“Perfect,” said Chuck, grinning. “Let’s get to work, then.”

We hadn’t talked about the missing bodies, the horror of cannibalism, but again it flashed in my mind. I wanted to forget it, to pretend it hadn’t happened.

It all seemed like it was now a million miles away.

I was in a great mood, and I made my way to the cellar, looking at the yellow carpet of leaves under the thin birch trees. Something, somehow, didn’t feel right, though. Taking a deep breath, I shook my head, putting it down to stress, and reached down to open the rickety cellar doors.

Day 31 – January 22

“YOU’RE GOING TO love these guys!”

Chuck was walking with me and Lauren down to the Baylors’ place. Chuck’s family had built here before it had been declared a national forest, and there were only a few cabins on the mountain.

We could see smoke from the Baylors’ chimney curling up out of the woods again that morning, and after a full breakfast, and with all our old clothes cleanly washed and hanging out back, it was time to go down and say hello.

“They live here year-round, they’re always here,” continued Chuck. “Randy is retired military, maybe even CIA. If anyone knows what’s going on, he will. They’re so well equipped they probably barely even noticed that the power’s been out.”

It wasn’t far, maybe a half mile, so we decided to walk. Susie and Tony stayed behind to refill the hot tub with creek water for the kids to have a swim. The day was beautiful. The freezing cold of Christmas had given way to unseasonably warm weather, and we were further south than New York.

The forest undergrowth at the sides of the dirt road winding down the mountain was abuzz with insects and life, its earthy dampness mixing with the smell of stones and dirt baking beneath our feet. Walking in the middle of the road, with the sun shining down hotly, I was sweating in my T-shirt and jeans.

I wish I had some sunscreen for the top of my head
, I laughed to myself.
It’s never seen the sun before.

Kicking some rocks down the road, Chuck was in high spirits. I felt like a new man, and Lauren and I were holding hands, swinging them together as we walked down the path. As we rounded a corner, the Baylors’ house appeared through the bare trees. We walked up their winding driveway, up to the two cars parked out front, and then onto their front porch.

Chuck knocked on the door.

“Randy!” he called out. “Cindy! It’s me, Charles Mumford!”

There was no answer, but somebody was home. Country music was playing around the back of the house.

“Randy! It’s me, Chuck!” he yelled louder.

I could smell something cooking.

“I’ll check around back. Maybe they’re in the yard, cutting wood or something. You guys stay here.”

He jumped off the porch and disappeared. Lauren squeezed my hand. We wandered over to the other side of the front porch, following the smell of whatever was cooking. Peering through the shuttered windows into the kitchen, I could see a large pot—
a cauldron
—with steam coming out of it. Bones were sticking out of the top, boiling in water.

Pain shot up through my hand, and I looked down to see Lauren’s white knuckles, her nails digging into me. Following her eyes to the dining room next to the kitchen, I saw a jumbled mess. Concentrating, I tried to figure out what I was looking at, angling for a better view through the shutters.

“Who the hell are you?” I heard someone say, muted, through the windows.

It wasn’t directed at us. Through the sliding-glass doors and large windows of the back of the house, I could see Chuck standing and addressing someone.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I heard some other voice reply to Chuck, its owner unseen, standing somewhere on the back deck.

“Let’s get out of here,” whispered Lauren urgently.

“We need to wait for Chuck,” I whispered back.

Her nails dug deeper into my hand.

Glancing back at the dining room, I moved my head, finally getting a clear view. It looked like someone was lying on the ground—
covered in blood, hacked apart
. The smell of the boiling meat enveloped me, and I almost gagged.

“Get the hell out of here!” another voice, a new voice, yelled from the back.

Chuck was standing with his gun out, one of the .38s, pointing it at someone walking up the stairs to the back deck.

They had a shotgun pointed at him.

“Where are the Baylors?” yelled Chuck, backing away slightly, moving his gun back and forth from one person to the other. “What did you do with them?”

That sense of unreality gripped me again as terror settled into my gut.

“We told you to get
out
of here, boy!”

“I’m not leaving! You tell me what—”

With a sharp crack and a boom, Chuck’s gun and the shotgun went off at nearly the same time. They shot him at point-blank range, and even from a distance, we could see blood splatter as he lifted into the air and fell spinning off the deck. Lauren cried out beside me, and we ducked down.

“Run,” I whispered to Lauren, pushing her ahead of me. “RUN!”

Doubled over, we ran past the parked cars and down the driveway, and then straightened up, running at full speed back up the road. My lungs burned, my arms and legs pumping, barely feeling like I was connected to what was happening.

I should have brought a gun. Why didn’t I bring a gun?

If I had, I’d probably be dead too.

Just run.

Behind me I could hear some commotion, some yelling. They must have seen us.

Run faster!

After what felt like an eternity, we reached the driveway of our cabin. Maroon 5 was playing loudly on the truck’s sound system, its windows down, and Adam Levine was singing “Moves Like Jagger.” In the distance I could hear something else.

A car engine.

They were coming after us.

I reached into the truck as I passed, grabbing the other .38 from the glove box.

“Go around back. They must be in the hot tub!”

We came flying around the corner to find Susie dancing on the deck with Luke, Tony kneeling down as he held up little Ellarose’s hands.

“Get down! We need to get out of here!” I screamed.

Tony looked at us in shock.

“What happened?”

“Just get down! We need to get in the truck!”

Lauren was already reaching up to grab Luke.

“Where’s Chuck?” asked Susie, her voice rising in fear.

She picked up Ellarose from Tony, and they were running down the deck stairs toward us.

“Come on!” I yelled.

But it was too late. Over the crooning of Christina Aguilera, I could hear another car crunching into the gravel in the front of the house.

What should I do?

“Where’s Chuck?” asked Susie again, pleading.

“He was shot. He’s down at the other house,” I replied, trying to think. “Tony, take the shotgun and take them in the cellar, I’m going to talk to them.”

“Talk to
who
? What the hell happened?”

We could hear car doors slamming shut out front.

Susie was on the verge of tears.

“Take Ellarose,” she said breathlessly to Tony, handing her over to him. She kissed Ellarose, tears streaming down her face. “I need to find Chuck.”

“What are you doing? He’s dead, he’s—”

But she ran off toward the other side of the cabin away from us.

I pushed Tony and Lauren ahead of me, reaching down to open the cellar doors, urging them down, just as three people came walking around the corner, two of them holding shotguns. Leaving one side of the cellar doors open, I stood my ground.

Maybe this is all just an accident. But those bones…

“What do you want?” I yelled, waving my gun around, but without a word one of them fired, and I felt a terrific concussion as the shot roared past me.

Terrified, I jumped down the stairs into the cellar, pulling the doors shut behind me and sliding a wooden beam into the handles to uselessly keep them shut.

We need something to keep them out.

Next to the stairs was a metal rack stacked with wood, and with shaking hands, I started pulling it, dragging it so it would block the doors if they opened them.

There must be a back way out of here.

But as I pulled, the rack fell onto me, crushing me.

Lauren shrieked.

“I’m okay,” I groaned, trying to pull myself out.

“For God’s sake, don’t let them take the children!”

Lauren cradled Ellarose, crouching in the corner across from me, as far from the cellar door as possible. It was dark and smelled of sawdust and oil and old tools. Luke was standing next to her, his face streaked with mud, mute with terror. Groaning, I pulled and squirmed to get my jammed leg out from under the pile of logs.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Mitchell, I’m not going to let anyone in here.”

Tony was standing up on the stairs, squinting into the sunlight streaming through cracks in the broken wood of the cellar door. “There are four of them.”

“We killed yer friend,” came a whiny voice.

Lauren began crying, clutching the two children closer.

“We didn’t wanna do that, mind you,” the voice continued. “Now this is all messed up.”

“Leave us alone!” I yelled. Tony took a step back down the stairs, moving sideways and pointing his rifle up at the cellar door.

“Send those kids and your lady out.”

I strained again to pull myself from the wreckage, in bone-cracking, skin-ripping agony. Lauren was violently shaking her head.

“Don’t let them eat my babies, Mike.”

And then silence—just my heart pounding in my ears and a shuffling through the leaves outside. I tried to steady myself, blotting out the pain, making sure the safety was off the .38. Tony glanced over, nodding, telling me he was ready.

With a terrific roar, the cellar door exploded. Tony staggered back, dropping to one knee. Another shotgun blast caught him, and he spun sideways but still managed to bring up his rifle and pull the trigger. Squeals of pain erupted outside, followed by another shotgun blast and then another through the cellar door.