Radioactive and The Decay Dystopian Super Boxset- A Dirty Bomb and Nuclear Blast Prepper Tale of Survival (12 page)

              It was darker than usual. An endless cover of clouds hid the moon from sight. A small crack of a twig, the rustling of leaves and grass, and the hoot of an owl overhead were amplified by the silence of the night.

              The subdivision sat on the edge of the highway across from the forest. The homes were spread out on large three-acre lots. The two-story castles sprawled out across them were meant to be places where the wealthy could have their space.

              Only the whites of Jim Farr’s eyes could be seen through the camouflage painted on his face as he crouched in the brush near the edge of the highway. His eyes were focused on a house in the distance across the highway from where he sat hidden. Jim clicked the radio around his neck. “Brett. Twink. You in position?”

              Brett was just outside the house in the backyard behind a small cluster of trees and bushes. He wore binoculars and peered through the back window of the two-story home. Twink was on his belly, sniper rifle tucked under his arm as he looked through the scope. Both were dressed from head to toe in their camouflage field gear. As they peered through their sights, the two kept watch on the nuclear-age family of four inside the house, who were sitting around the table eating dinner.

              Brett flicked on his radio, “Roger that. Target’s still with family.”

              “This still feels weird,” Twink said.

              Brett dropped the binoculars from his face but kept his eyes on the back of the house. “Yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever get used to being on missions in our own country.”

              Jim checked his watch. 8:11 p.m. He shook his head. The family shouldn’t even be there tonight. Jim had done recon on the target for weeks.

              “What’s it gonna be, Jim?” Brett asked.

              Jim’s steady, controlled breaths made puffs of cold air appear into the night as he spoke. “We give it another hour. That’ll still give us enough time to get to the evac zone. If we can’t get a good bead on the target by then, we abort.”

              Coyle sat crouched about a mile away at the landing zone. He leaned back against a tree, his rifle across his lap, looking up into the night sky. He was feeling incredibly hungry. “What are they having?” he asked over the radio.

              Brett pulled his binoculars back up and zoomed the magnification to half of its 1,600-yard capacity. He saw the father shovel a piece of pasta in his mouth. “Looks like lasagna,” Brett responded.

              Coyle placed his hand over his stomach as he moaned out in agony. He clicked on his radio, and a low rumble echoed in everyone’s ear as his stomach growled.  “Do you hear that?” he asked. “If I don’t eat something soon, my stomach is going to give away our position.”

              It was close to nine o’clock when the family finally finished their meal. The parents took the dishes into the kitchen as the kids ran screaming up the stairs, chasing after one another.

              Brett’s eyes kept a bead on the target and clicked his radio on. “Dinner’s over. Kids are upstairs playing video games. Target is still in the kitchen,” he replied while he watched the man and woman washing dishes through the kitchen window.

              Now was the time. Jim’s knees cracked as he rose from the grass and leaves. Hours of stillness had left his body stiff. He darted across the highway, his rifle nose scanning the yard.  “Brett, get in position to kill the power and wait for my signal,” Jim ordered. “Twink…keep an eye on the kids and make sure they don’t come downstairs.”

              Twink swung his scope up toward the second floor, making sure his finger was nowhere near the trigger. “Copy that,” Twink responded.

              Jim ducked alongside the fence on the perimeter of the house. The nearest house to them was three hundred yards away and with the lack of streetlights, he was perfectly hidden in the night. He clicked on his radio as he opened the gate to the back yard, keeping his voice low.

              “Coyle, let command know we’ll be in your location and ready for evac in twenty minutes.”

              Coyle flopped from his stomach to his back and picked up his radio. “HQ, this is goliath, the package will be ready at 2120 hours.”

              Brett made it over to the power box and cracked the cover open with the blade on his knife. Dozens of wires ran up and down the box, and Brett held his blade underneath them, waiting for Jim’s signal.

              Jim inched closer to the back corner of the house. Just beyond that corner was the exterior kitchen door. Jim dropped low to his knee at the corner’s edge. “Twink, kids still upstairs?”

              Twink looked through the cross hairs of his scope. The kids were still hypnotized by the television. “Affirmative.”.

              Jim peeked around the corner of the wall to get a better look at the door he planned to breach. Jim took a soft, slow breath and then pressed his communication link. “Brett, on my mark, cut the power.”

              Brett stood at the box poised to cut the wire. He could feel the blade digging into the wax coatings of the wires in his hand as he applied a steady, gentle pressure.

              Twink shifted his focus from the kids’ room back down to the kitchen window, where the mother and father shared a laugh as she dipped the dishes into soapy water and he dried them. Only ten feet to the left, Twink saw Jim strapping on his night vision goggles at the corner of the house.

              Jim’s breath accelerated as he adjusted his goggles. His heart beat hard against his shirt. He squeezed the grip of his rifle and his knuckles turned white. He inched as close to the edge of the wall as he could without passing it. His thumb flicked the safety lever off. “Kill power.”

              The entire neighborhood went black. Jim sprinted toward the back door. He kept up his speed as he swung his leg up and smashed the door open, leaving the doorframe splintered around its edges. Jim viewed the couple through the green hue of his goggles as the husband pushed his wife behind him and backed them into a corner of the kitchen. Jim’s rifle kept a bead on the target even though she was well covered.

              “Please,” begged the man, “don’t hurt us. We didn’t do anything. Take what you want.”

              “Get down on the ground. Now!”

              As the husband began to comply, the wife put a knife to his throat, keeping him in place.

              Jim cursed under his breath. “Drop the knife, Kate!”

              Kate pressed the blade deeper into her husband’s neck. A trickle of blood ran down his neck, staining his white collar.

              “Kate,” the husband asked, “what are you doing?”

              “Shut up, Doug,” she said.

              Jim peered through the sight on his rifle. He didn’t have a clear shot. He inched a little closer.

              “A corpse still works as a shield,” Kate warned.

              Jim froze. He started to feel hot. The room swayed. He could taste sand in his mouth and his lips felt chapped and dry. He glanced down at the rifle in his hands, except it wasn’t a rifle anymore. It was a 9mm pistol. He looked at Kate and Doug, but it wasn’t them anymore…it was Matt using his 5-year-old niece as a human shield.

              Kate worked her husband like a puppet along the kitchen counter. They passed the refrigerator, moving in front of Jim, who was preoccupied with trying to shake the images from his mind.

              Jim’s rifle dipped, which gave Kate the window she was looking for. She knocked Doug’s legs from underneath him and sent him barreling into Jim. Jim popped out of the hallucination and instinctively swung his rifle, knocking the husband out with the butt of the weapon.

              Jim shook the images from his mind. He jumped over Doug’s collapsed body and chased Kate through the living room. She flung the blade back at Jim, slicing his shoulder.

              Kate’s hand wrapped around the knob of the front door. She jerked it open, but Jim slammed into the back of her, forcing the door shut. She fought back as Jim tied her hands behind her back with a piece of zip line. Then Jim heard the hard click of a hammer being pulled back on a revolver behind him.

              Kate’s son, no older than nine, stood on the steps of the staircase behind Jim with tears streaming down his face and the six shooter shaking in his hands. His younger brother was crouched behind his legs, clutching the staircase banister as sobs left his tiny body.

              Jim kept Kate close, turning the both of them around. He kept one hand on Kate’s restraints and the other up high; free of any weapons. “Take it easy, buddy,” Jim said calmly.

              “L-let her go,” the boy said. His voice trembling as he kept both hands on the pistol aimed at Jim’s head.

              “Hunny, come and get mommy out of these cuffs, okay?”

              The boy moved down the steps, trembling as he approached his mother. Jim pulled Kate slowly away from the front door back through the living room.

              “Go back upstairs,” Jim said, his eyes soft as the young boy followed. “We’re not going to hurt anyone.” Jim bumped into furniture backing up towards the smashed rear door that had served as his entrance point. The boy pursued them sheepishly until his eyes fell onto his unconscious father sprawled out on the ground. Jim let go of Kate and lunged for the pistol in the boy’s hands, knocking him to the ground. Jim turned to watch Kate vanish out the back door. Jim flipped on his radio. “Twink, she’s heading your way!”

              Jim looked down at the boy who had crawled over to his father. He was crying and shaking his father’s body. Jim gently lowered the hammer of the revolver and shoved it into his belt loop. When he rushed out the back, Twink was wrestling Kate to the ground. Brett was already over helping keep Kate down. Brett pulled out a syringe and stuck it into Kate’s arm. Her body finally stopped resisting and went limp on the grass in her backyard.

              Blood dripped from Brett’s nose where Kate had kicked him. “Well, I’m not carrying the crazy bitch.”

              With Kate over his shoulder, Jim started the long hike through the rocky terrain toward the evacuation site. The cries from the boys inside the house never quite faded away, no matter how far Jim walked.

              The chopper was waiting at the rendezvous point when they arrived. Jim and Twink secured Kate in one of the harnesses while Coyle and Brett strapped themselves in. Coyle looked around the group, his eyebrows raised as if he were waiting for something.

              “What?” Jim asked.

              “No leftovers?” Coyle asked.

***

              The helicopter landed fifty miles south in Northern California at a military installation that wasn’t on any civilian map. Kate was still unconscious when they arrived. A pair of medics came and put her on a stretcher to take her to the interrogation room where she’d be “woken up.”

              Jim, Coyle, Brett, and Twink headed toward the command post to be debriefed. Coyle walked ahead with Jim while Brett and Twink hung back out of earshot.

              “What happened in there?” Brett asked.

              Twink adjusted the shoulder strap of his pack as they walked across the tarmac. “Not sure. I think he froze up again.”.

              “He hasn’t been the same since Phoenix,” Brett said.

              “I don’t think anyone would be the same after what he went through,” Twink said.

              Jim walked to General Locke’s office. Coyle was chewing his ear off about something, but Jim wasn’t listening. His mind retreated back to the missions he’d been on over the last three months. It was his driving force. Those missions gave him something to focus on so he didn’t have to think about anything else.