Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2) (4 page)

They weren’t cruising along the back roads for more than a few minutes before they spotted
a man with bloody clothes. He was staggering along the centerline, which meant he was either crazy, suicidal or somewhere in between. John slowed down, feeling for the familiar weight of the pistol in his leg holster. After coming to a stop, John rolled down the window and called out to him.

“Where you headed?”

The trick was to act as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The man spun and threw his hands in the air.

“I knew you’d be back to finish me off.”

“What’s he saying?” Brandon said.

“I’m not sure.” John asked him to clarify
, after which the man burst into tears.

“He’s gone crazy,”
Brandon observed, offering his clinical assessment.

John scanned the forest on either side of the road,
then up ahead and behind them. There was no sign of anyone else. He opened the door and stepped out. His gut told him this wasn’t an ambush, since it hardly seemed reasonable that a man would wait for a vehicle to come along in a post-EMP world.

“Take the AR and cover me from here,” he told the boy
, who did so by leaning slightly out the passenger window.

It was one thing being sure this wasn’t an ambush, but another thing altogether not taking the proper precautions in case he was wrong.

The man in the middle of the road was still sobbing. His clothes were ripped and it was clear someone had beaten him, possibly even left him for dead.

“You’re bleeding,” John said.

“My son,” the man said. “I’m looking for my son.”

“Where did you leave him?”

A string of drool ran down his chin. “I didn’t. He was taken from me.”

Chills ran down John’s spine. He checked his surr
oundings again, to calm the creeping feeling that they were being watched.

“Do you know who did this to you?”

The man nodded.

“Okay, come with us.”

He ushered the man into the back of the truck, checking him quickly for knives or weapons and finding none.

A second later they were off again, rolling down
Carson Hill Road with a million questions coursing through John’s head. He still wasn’t sure what the source of the man’s wound was, or if the blood was even his. Sitting in the back, the man pulled his hand down over his face in an effort to clean away the tears and dribble.

“What’s your name
?” John asked.

He drew in a deep breath. “Gary Bertolino. Thank you for stopping to help. Seems decent people are getting
scarcer and scarcer these days.”

“I couldn’t just leave a bloodied man on the side of the road. Where are you from
, Gary?” John wondered if perhaps the man had been in one of the waves of golden horders who’d fled the city.

“I have a house in
Oneida and a cabin on Owens Ridge. Once the lights went out and the cars stopped working, my wife and son and I packed a few supplies together and made our way east.”

“You walked here from
Oneida?”

Gary
shook his head. He was a skinny man who floated in his clothes and moving his head only accentuated the impression. “We rode our bikes. It wasn’t further than twenty miles or so and I knew our cabin would be as safe a place as any to ride out the storm. Least, I thought it would be.” His face crumpled with fresh tears.

“I need you to hold it together for me
, Gary. We’ve lost people too and I need your help to figure out who did this.”

Gary
was pawing at the blood on his shirt as though he were seeing it for the first time. “All I know is that a bunch of men in trucks came onto our property and told us to hand over our firearms.”

“What?”

“Yessir. They waved around a piece of paper that looked official enough. Had the president’s seal on it. You know that thing on the carpet in the Oval Office?”

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Well, these guys looked real official, wearing black cargo pants and armed to the teeth. Said the governor for this district had sent them to disarm the local population by order of the president.”

“
Governor for this district,” John spat, hating the way the words sounded. “That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“
You said it. I told them as much too. They replied that I could keep one pistol and fifty rounds of ammo. ‘How am I gonna hunt?’ That’s what I asked them. And you know what they said? ‘That’s what the pistol’s for.’ You ever tried hunting with a pistol?”

John shook his head.
“Can’t say that I have.”

“Course not,
’cause I can see you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Man can’t hunt with a pistol. Wasn’t even gonna let me keep my deer rifle. Anyway, I told them to turn those trucks around and head back to where they came from. Told them to go have a read through the Constitution again if their recollection was rusty. That was when they opened fire. Killed my Beth right there in front of me. Then they went through the house and took my Ruger American and my brand new Glock 21 and anything else they fancied. Pretty much cleaned me out and then set the place on fire.”

“What about your son?”

“They threw him in the truck and drove off. Probably figured without food or water I wouldn’t last long. I wasn’t worth wasting a bullet on, I suppose. If I’d only given him my guns, maybe Beth would still be alive and I wouldn’t have lost Billy.” Gary was getting choked up again and John gave him a minute.

“
Do you remember hearing where they were taking them? Knoxville, maybe?”

“I wish I knew.”

John gripped the steering wheel as they drove on. It was clear enough that whoever had done this to Gary and his family had also been the ones to kill Tim and kidnap the others. If ever there was a time when regular folks needed weapons to defend themselves it was now, with the grid down and the police no longer an effective deterrent. John couldn’t grasp the logic behind the president’s decree, nor the legality of such a move in the first place. Any proposal that threatened the Second Amendment had to first go through a long legal process. Thankfully, it wasn’t something a single figure could change with the stroke of a pen.

Unless
, that was, there had been a coup. Or the rights that they had come to know and cherish had somehow been suspended.

John made a right on
Phillips Road, which led down from the mountains and into the valley near Oneida. Yesterday he’d gone a ways along the interstate without seeing any sign of the people who’d taken his family. Afterward, he’d taken one of the small back roads west and come across what looked like a roadblock of some sort. The men pointing rifles in his direction had been an added incentive to save that route for last.

There was a systematic way to go about this.
Gary had provided an important, although slightly vague piece of the puzzle. If they failed to find any sign of them between here and Oneida, John would then find a place to fill the jerrycans on Betsy’s rear door with diesel and consider heading back toward Knoxville.

He was contemplating that very possibility when he
made his way around a curve and came to an older SUV on the shoulder of the street. Nearby were four men. Two of them were kneeling on the ground, their wrists bound behind their backs with zip ties. Two others were wearing green fatigues and aiming a pair of AKs at their prisoners’ heads.

John was about to throw the truck into reverse when he noticed the men on the ground were wearing dark cargo pants. Could they be from the same group that had attacked Gary and John’s family?

He slipped his S&W out from its holster and slid it over to
Brandon. “Crack your window open and get ready to back me up if things go bad.”

John pulled the AR from between the seat and the middle console and opened the driver side door.

One of the two guarding the men on the ground swung his weapon in John’s direction.

“Don’t make a move,” he said.

John remained still. “Take it easy, friend. We don’t have a beef with either of you gentlemen. We’re looking for our families who were taken from us. We’re on the same side.”

“Drop your weapon and kick it over here,” the one
aiming in his direction ordered.

If he’d been alone, John might have angled the car so he could take cover behind the wheel well, but that move would have left
Brandon and Gary exposed. Contrary to the movies, 5.56 and 7.62 rounds could penetrate both car doors with ease.

“They’re going to execute us,” one of the men kneeling started to say
, and John didn’t feel an ounce of pity, especially if they had done what he thought they had.

“I’m afraid I can’t hand my weapon over,” John informed him. “I’m assuming you caught these men
ransacking your cabin.”

The men in green fatigues looked confused. “
These boys are insurgents who are about to be executed,” the first one said. “We’re here by order of the president. Charged with bringing law and order back to the county.”

And suddenly John realized he’d been wrong.
He’d assumed because of their dark cargo pants that the men kneeling on the ground were responsible for the attacks against the locals, but now it was crystal clear who the real threat was.

Pushing off with his forward foot,
John raced to the back of the truck right as the first one opened fire. Bullets tore through the open driver’s side door. Splinters of rock and asphalt jumped at his feet. Brandon stuck his hand out the window and rattled off a handful of shots, all of which went wide.

Now behind the truck, John dropped
into a prone position. With a clear view from under Betsy, he aimed and then squeezed the trigger three times. The first man with the fatigues was struck in the chest and dropped at about the same time as the second took off sprinting toward the forest’s edge.

Mo
ving to the corner of the truck, John settled into a kneeling position and tracked the man through his Trijicon ACOG as his target ran over uneven ground. He was having difficulty keeping the sights on him. Soon the man was climbing the side of the hill next to the road. Taking a deep breath, John fired five rounds. The first four narrowly missed, kicking up dirt around the fleeing man’s legs. The fifth took the top of his head off.

“Darn it,” John
blurted in frustration. He hadn’t wanted to kill him. Least not before he had a chance to ask him some questions. But moving targets were some of the hardest to hit. It was an element of prepping most didn’t take into account. Of course firing at a range was important since, like all muscles, marksmanship had a tendency to atrophy if neglected. But most shooters tended to practice by firing on static targets, often paper cutouts or AR500 steel plates, rather than at a dynamic range where movement was incorporated into the drill. He made a mental note to address this deficiency in his tactical training as soon as possible.

The other men
in dark cargo pants were on their feet now, contemplating whether or not to run. One of them had a mohawk. He wound up and began kicking the body next to him.

“Enough,” John shouted. He was still trying to assess the situation and abusing the dead, no matter what they’d done, wasn’t part of his ethos. He rapped on the side of the truck. “You two okay in there?”

Gary’s weak voice came back after a moment’s hesitation. “I think so.”

Brandon
opened the passenger door, the pistol out in front of him. “Did I hit anyone?” he asked.

John
edged closer, his AR in the low ready position.

Brandon
’s question was met with laughter from the one with the mohawk. “Not even close, kid. But I think you gave a squirrel in that tree over there a heart attack.”

His buddy next to him
also chuckled.

“You did fine,” John told
Brandon before turning back to the men in the black pants. “You wanna tell me who they were?” he asked, ignoring any pleasantries.

“How about you
cut these zip ties off us first?” the blond guy next to Mohawk said.

John looked down at the dead man and
slid his rifle away with the tip of his boot. He told Brandon to collect the other man’s weapon.

“Where I come from, the
guy with the gun makes the decisions. They called you two insurgents.”

Mohawk grinned. “We been called worse. Domestic terrorists is my personal favorite.
Let’s just say we’re part of a movement against anyone who thinks they can come along and take what’s ours.”

“
They’re here on behalf of the Feds,” the blond man said. “Don’t make no difference to me. We were living peacefully, trying to get by without power just like everyone else, and then a bunch of these government spooks show up demanding we hand over our weapons.”

Gary
was at John’s elbow now. “They did the same to me. Killed my wife.”

Mohawk’s gaze settled on John. “What’
s your story? Just a Good Samaritan passing through?”

John grinned, squeezing the dimple in
the center of his chin. “Seems we’re all in the same boat. My family was taken and it looks like I may have just killed the very men who could have led me to them.”

“Hell, there’s plenty more where they came from,” Mohawk
told him enthusiastically. “Oneida’s full of ’em. That’s where they’re headquartered.”

“How do you know for certain?” John asked, not wanting to get his hopes up.

The corners of Mohawk’s lips rose in a smile. “You heard it from the dead man’s own lips. We’re insurgents.”