Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2) (6 page)

John came to as the Blazer’s tires
struggled to gain traction on a steep gravel road. Blinking hard, he took in his surroundings, aware of a dull thumping in his head. Thick forest lined the narrow path.

Ahead of them were Moss and Sullivan. Slowly, the road leveled out and came to a checkpoint
guarded by four men with an assortment of low-grade weaponry. Two had twelve-gauge shotguns, another a deer rifle and the last a Kel-Tec SU-16.

Ahead
of them, Moss pulled to a stop, lowered his window and announced their presence. Compared to John’s days in Iraq and North Africa, security here seemed lax. There were no spike strips for starters and the men at the checkpoint allowed a car to get right up before making clear who they were. This wasn’t John’s problem, he thought, feeling his old self starting to return. His only hope was that following Moss would soon lead to information he could use to find and free his loved ones before it was too late.

When he looked down at his chest, his rig was undone and his shirt pulled open.
Brandon must have been searching for wounds when he was out. It appeared that John’s only wound was a bruised ego.

A few
yards on they came to a clearing in the woods that looked more like a shanty town than it did an armed encampment. On the right were rows of older cars, from pickups to collector sports cars. Mounted on the back of one pickup was something John had only ever seen in Africa and the Middle East—twin ARs with drum magazines tied together into a single weapon. He assumed they’d also been modified to fire automatically. Which meant this group had at least one gunsmith.

“A poor man’s technical,” John said,
impressed.

Gary
leaned around from the driver’s seat. “What was that, John?”

His breath smelled of rotting food. Another of the
many drawbacks of living in a world without sanitation.

“They have a technical. It’
s usually a pickup with a large-caliber machine gun, normally a .50 cal or higher, mounted on the back. It’s popular with poorly equipped armies. Iraq, Syria, Somalia. It’s a light and mobile way to bring fire onto a target, but it offers virtually no protection for the driver or gunner.” He pointed to the truck with the twin ARs. “Short of large-caliber weaponry, these guys have created the next best thing. Great for laying down some suppressing fire.”

“Suppressing fire?”
Brandon asked.

“Large
-caliber weapons are designed to keep enemies pinned down so friendly forces can move into position and engage them,” John told him. Even though Brandon could handle himself in a firefight, like many kids his age, most of his combat knowledge came from movies and video games. What did Sylvester Stallone need suppressing fire for when he could mow down hundreds of enemies at once with a .50 cal?

On their left were rows of flimsy wooden
-framed shacks with tarps laid over as a makeshift roof. Many of the fighters in camp looked like the Rebs in the final days of the Civil War, hungry and wearing ratty clothes with gaping holes. Punctuating this image was the odd individual in full tactical gear. To John, it was a clear sign that circumstances had thrown this wild assortment of men together toward a common cause.

A knock on his window. Moss and Sullivan were
standing there, waving them out. Standing behind them was a man with a dark, unkempt beard and deep-set eyes.

All three exited Betsy.

“Moss and Sullivan here tell me you saved their rear ends from being turned to hamburger meat,” the bearded man said. His voice was deep and gravelly. He looked like the sort of man who smoked too many cigarettes, but more than that he looked like a man you didn’t want on your bad side.

“That might be true
,” John replied, “but they’ve already returned the favor.”

“I heard
that too. So tell me,” he said. “What were you doing charging into a fortified city on your own?”

“My wife and children
—”

“
—were taken,” the bearded man said, finishing John’s sentence. “Look around you. We’ve all suffered loss here.” He studied John up and down before offering him a callused hand. “I’m Marshall.”

They shook.
Then Marshall greeted Brandon and Gary.

“You’re former military, aren’t you?”

“I thought I hid it better than that,” John replied and Marshall’s belly shook with laughter.

“Any wannabe can wear
the gear,” the commander said, “but there’s a special look a man gets when he’s seen his friends shot and killed around him. Iraqi Freedom?”

John nodded. “For starters.”

Marshall clapped him on the shoulder. “Desert Storm for me. The precision war. That’s where I cut my teeth. Came back from that hot mess and became a plumber. Now look at me. Forced out of retirement.” That beaming smile again and a set of crooked teeth too small for his mouth.

“What is all this?” John asked. He was referring to the camp and what looked to be a few hundred fighters.

“They’re Patriots, John. Defenders of the Constitution. I told you before you’d be hard pressed to find anyone here who doesn’t have a story.”

“We’ve all suffer
ed since it happened.”

“
Do you mean the EMP?” Marshall asked, leading them over to a large tent in the middle of the camp. This was presumably his command headquarters. “’Cause I ain’t talking about the burst. I’m talking about the Chairman, the tyrant who’s taken control of Oneida.”

“Moss mentioned something about that.”

“He should know. Our mohawked friend used to live there, that was until the Chairman rolled in with his Secret Service goons and took over. Truth is, no one knows a thing about the Chairman. Only that the trouble started when he showed up. He’s been slowly solidifying his power. In part by disarming anyone in what he’s calling his district. Claims it’s to preserve law and order the way sheriffs in the old days made cowboys turn in their guns on the way into town. If you refuse his men use deadly force. Then when they have your guns they return for your supplies and eventually your women and children.”

“
He returns for the children?” John wondered out loud, his jaw clenching. “What for?”

“
Use your imagination. He’s like one of them medieval lords, taking whatever he wants from those in his domain.”

John nodded.
“I’ve seen his type before back in Knoxville right after the collapse. Drug dealers and gangbangers used their gang members as muscle to fill the power vacuum.”

“Oh
, the Chairman’s no gangbanger,” Marshall said. “I can promise you that. This guy’s well spoken and intelligent. Along with his Secret Service men, he also showed up with a presidential decree designating him the temporary mayor of Oneida. And he ain’t the only one around. Seems nearly every city in the country with more than a few thousand residents is under new management.”

“
But a presidential decree?” John repeated the words as though saying them over might help make more sense of them. “What about elections?”

“
Suspended apparently. As was the Constitution and the Second Amendment, from the looks of things. Hey, we already knew the Feds were heading in that direction. I guess it took a major attack for them to finally come jumping out of the closet.”

Even as
Marshall was telling him about the Chairman and the unlikely edict which put him in charge of Oneida, John was beginning to formulate a new plan for infiltrating and extracting his family, the Applebys and maybe even Gary’s son if he could find him.

Marshall
must have sensed John’s attention shift. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “I’ve got a group of men who should be returning with some deer anytime now.”

“I’m so hungry I could
eat a horse,” Brandon blurted out before John could give him the eye to stay quiet. Lethargic as he was, Gary was in agreement.

“Firing guns in the forest is a sure way to draw attention,” John said. “There are easier, quieter ways to get food. Trapping, fishing, planting a few crops. There are also a number of edible plants in the forest.”

That smile was back on Marshall’s bearded face. He turned to Moss who’d been standing quietly by his commander’s side. “Our new friend is a real jack of all trades.”

Moss nodded. “We could use someone with your skills, John.”

John had been worried this would happen. Not that he didn’t want to lend a hand. Marshall’s men and resources could help him free his family, but it also created a danger that his immediate objectives might get put on the backburner. Time wasn’t on his side. Every minute, every hour wasted only increased the chances of losing his family forever.

But what was also
becoming clear was that in this new world, where groups of like-minded people were banding together, it would become increasingly difficult to go it alone.

“You
don’t need to answer yet, John,” Marshall told him. “The truth is, you saved two of my best men. Tonight you and your friends are my guests. Tomorrow we can discuss how to get your family back.”

As
Marshall had promised, a group of men eventually returned with three Virginia white-tailed deer. Each man brought his own metal plate and water cup and cooked the piece of meat he was given over a small fire. John understood perfectly well this sort of hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t ideal. So long as Marshall could keep the location of his camp a secret, it made far more sense for them to find more self-sustaining ways of gathering nourishment.

Instead of building a spit, John instead laid metal tent pegs across stones and used those as a makeshift grill.
Brandon couldn’t hide his anticipation as he watched the meat sizzle over the fire. John served the boy first, then Gary and himself last. Deer was a lean meat with very little fat. It had a gamey taste that John quite enjoyed. Judging by the expression on Brandon’s face, he wasn’t alone.

After din
ner, John went and fed George. He was hesitant to take the goose out just in case the thought of cooking the bird proved too great a temptation for some of the men in camp. Keeping the windows open would also help, but it wouldn’t be long before they had to decide what to do with him. Already the thing had pooped once in his cage and no doubt plenty more was on the way. Of course, the ideal scenario would have been to build an enclosure where they could keep him. Seemed a shame to release food back into the wild when you were never sure where the next meal might be.

As they had
done last night, John and Brandon would sleep in the Blazer. Moss had found an extra spot for Gary in one of the shacks.

John was closing up Betsy’s rear hatch when
Brandon got up from his seat around the fire and walked to the edge of the woods. The sun had set an hour ago and already the moon was bright in the evening sky. John went over to see if the boy was all right.

“How you holding up?
” John asked, feeling a stabbing pain in his gut from missing Gregory and Emma.

Brandon
looked over briefly, but didn’t say anything.

“
It hurts, I know. Trust me, it’ll only get worse.”

“I’ve been thinking about what
Marshall said this afternoon,” Brandon said, his face bathed in white light from the moon.

“What about it?”

“They’re probably all dead.”

“Don’t say that,” John
chided him. The very suggestion that his family was gone made his gut tighten painfully.

“I’m not trying to be negative, but after what
Marshall and some of the others in camp have said…”

“Like who?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A guy, think his name was Gus or something. He said he heard from people living in Oneida that his wife and daughter were charged with aiding and abetting terrorists and that they were executed. Those folks are putting on mock trials.”

John swallowed hard. Since when
had ‘patriot’ become a four-letter word? It was beginning to look as though whoever was running the tattered remains of the government was quick to label any armed American who sought to protect his family and his country a terrorist.

“Thinking that way
never leads to a good place, Brandon. I promise you we’re gonna find them.”

“You can’t make that promise.”

The kid was right. “Maybe not, but I can guarantee you I’ll do everything in my power to get them out of there. I tried going in alone and it was a dumb thing to do. I’m lucky to still be alive. Besides, we need to get a grasp on this Chairman character and figure out what we’re really up against. What do you think?”

Brandon
didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. John reached out and pulled him into a hug. This was all Brandon probably wanted anyway, someone to tell him everything was going to be all right. And who could blame him in a world like this?

Brandon
wept until he’d exorcised as much of it from his system as he could. Processing the loss of his father wasn’t going to take thirty minutes like it did on
Dr. Phil
or countless other TV shows that were thankfully gone. This was a real loss. The kid had known and loved his father for years. It was going to take a while for the wave of grief to gradually subside. Although it never would completely.

Not long after, they headed back to Betsy, exhausted and eager to hit the sack.
Nevertheless, it was a while before John managed to fall asleep. He kept seeing the faces of the two men he’d killed today. The first as he’d collapsed in the middle of the street. Then his companion as the top of his head had exploded in a fine red mist. Eventually, sleep engulfed him and that was when John dreamed of Iraq.

•••

June nineteenth, 2006. Apart from the two soldiers who were still missing, it was looking like just another day in Iraq. News had been trickling in to the operations center all afternoon and none of it was good. Seven bombings in and around Baghdad had left forty-three civilians dead. In one of them, a man had detonated a shoe bomb in a Shiite mosque, killing eleven.

To the west,
U.S. and Iraqi troops were in the process of surrounding the Sunni city of Ramadi. The civilians trapped in the city expected a Fallujah-type assault any time now. John was moving onto something about prisoner mistreatment when First Sergeant Wright appeared.

Sweat poured down
Wright’s neck and John wasn’t sure if it was due to the stifling desert heat outside or the news he was about to deliver.

“I’ve seen that look on your face before
, 1SG,” John said. “And both times you were bringing me bad news.”

“We found them,” was
Wright’s only reply.

“P
FC Hutchinson and PFC Davis?”

“Yes, sir. About three miles from here.”

Wright didn’t say more, not right away, and John had a good idea why.

“They’re dead
, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

The muscles in John’s jaw tensed as though he were working something hard between his teeth. He’d been to the base dental clinic three times already for grinding. During the day his response to the stress was often to clench. In his sleep he tended to grind, but all that really accomplished was a slow erosion of his enamel. At this rate he’d be in dentures within a year.

“Found them in a gulley south of the
village of Mufaraji.”

“Had they been…” John paused.

“Decapitated? No. They’d been tortured, at least as far as we’ve been able to tell, but they weren’t mutilated.”

“Good. It’s horrible when the family has to see that sort of thing.” Whether they heard it on the news or not, John knew they
would find out once the body arrived Stateside. Of course, the barbarity perpetrated by the enemy only strengthened his will to destroy them. “Wait, what do you mean as far as you can tell?”

Wright’s eyes dropped. “The EOD team’s still working on
them.”

Wright’s answer confused John for a moment. EOD stood for
Explosive Ordnance Disposal. He asked his sergeant to explain.

“
Hutchinson and Davis were both rigged with an IED. Those initial explosives were attached to lines leading to others in the immediate area. The idea was to lure our boys in and then detonate to create more casualties.”

The bastards were using
their commitment to leave no man behind against them. Now this would surely be in the news. Not that John gave a damn about the bad publicity. It was the young soldiers’ families having to hear about this. It was hard enough losing a loved one, but to lose them like this?

The other implication was something that showed ever so slightly in Wright’s expression. John had committed to bringing the missing soldiers home alive.
A promise that he’d failed to keep.