Feral Nation Series: Books 1-3: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series Boxed Set Read online

  Bart expected to see them pull out the tools they would need for breaking and entering next, but they did not. Once they secured their boat they just stood there next to the kayak, apparently discussing something and in no particular hurry to begin what they came for. Bart wondered which of the dry-docked yachts they were going to select first, but when they finally started walking, they made a beeline straight for his office instead. What they expected to find in there he had no idea, but he figured he would get a chance for a clean shot once they reached the door. Anticipating this in advance, Bart quickly crawled across the bow of the trawler to set up in a better position to take them out. He decided that their first attempt to breech the door would be his signal to open fire, and from the looks of it, he wouldn’t have long to wait.

  When the two men reached the small concrete porch in front of the entrance, they each leaned up to the small window near the top of the metal door and looked in. There was nothing to see in the dark room inside, but Bart figured they were probably making sure no one was around before they began to break in. It was odd that they didn’t have a crowbar or something with them to do it, but then again, maybe they were planning to find something handy in the yard.

  The first one that had gotten out of the kayak was standing nearest to him, and when he turned to look around at the surrounding boats, Bart brought the reticle of his scope onto his face. The light was much better here, and with the 4x magnification, he could see that the fellow was young, maybe even a teenager. Longish brown hair framed his gaunt-looking face, and even though he was unshaven, his beard and mustache was sparse, barely forming a shadow over his boney features. He was thin all over, but whether that was from going hungry since the hurricane or just his natural, underdeveloped state, Bart couldn’t tell.

  So far, he hadn’t gotten a good look at his partner’s face. He did notice that the other one had a heavier beard though, and figured he might be older. Maybe the two of them were brothers, or perhaps even father and son. Bart didn’t know why he thought of it, because it certainly didn’t matter. He didn’t care who they were. The minute they attempted to break in that office or touch one of his boats, they were going to pay the ultimate price for their bad decisions.

  When the older-looking man stepped off the porch and disappeared around the corner of the building, Bart figured he was looking for something with which to punch out the glass so he could reach in and unlock the door. There was no shortage of scrap metal and chunks of two-by-fours and other lumber scattered around with which he could accomplish that task, and it would no doubt be just a minute or two more before it was time to shoot. While he waited, Bart watched the young fellow as he stood there looking around, holding the black rifle in his hands as if he expected to need it. Bart already knew the rifles they carried were variants of that popular design he so despised, but he would add them to his growing collection anyway. The other fellow that was out of sight had the one with the grenade launcher. If it was real and he had any live rounds for it, it could make a good addition to his arsenal. But if nothing else, the rifles would probably come in handy as trade goods somewhere farther down the line.

  Bart waited, wondering what was taking the man so long when there were so many things available that he could pick up to smash out a window. He was ready to get this over with. It was less than two hours until dawn and by the time he did the shooting and dragged the bodies to the water and disposed of them, he would come close to running out of darkness. Another couple minutes passed before the man finally returned, and when he did, Bart saw that he was still empty handed. His rifle in its sling was pushed off to one side, and he was adjusting his belt, as if he’d simply stepped around there to take a leak. The young fellow was saying something to him when the man finished with his belt and reached for the doorknob as if to test the lock. Bart brought the reticle onto the side of his head, centering his aim point just in front of the man’s left ear. His finger was taking up the slack in the trigger as he slowed his breathing and put all of his focus into the target. He was only waiting until the man forced the door, and as soon as he did, he would die. Bart certainly didn’t want a situation where one or both of them were holed up inside his office with rifles and maybe even a grenade launcher, because that would be a far more difficult problem to solve. Better to kill them both now, while they were still outside in the open. Bart felt the firmness of the trigger against the pad of his index finger, and then the man turned to speak to his partner, moving his face slightly out the crosshairs. His first instinct was to simply realign them between his target’s eyes, and Bart did. He wouldn’t have thought about the face itself, but for some reason he allowed himself to study it for a second. What he saw when he did caused him to break out in a cold sweat; his hands trembling as he carefully eased his finger away from the trigger. He had almost shot his firstborn son! The man in his crosshairs was Eric Branson!

  Twenty-one

  BART PLACED HIS RIFLE on the deck beside him and pulled himself up to his knees, still shaking from adrenalin as he realized what he’d nearly done. Eric and the young fellow with him were totally oblivious to his presence until he called out to them.

  “ERIC! What the hell are you doing sneaking into my yard in the dark like this? You nearly got yourself shot, boy!”

  “DAD! Is that you? Where are you?”

  Bart saw them scanning their surroundings, looking for him among the nearby boats.

  “Up here, Eric! You ought to know I’d pick an elevated position, given a choice. Wait where you are, I’m coming down!”

  Eric and the young fellow with him didn’t wait though. They were at the bottom of the ladder before Bart even reached the ground. He stepped off the last rung and turned around to find himself trapped in a giant bear hug, his son lifting him completely off the ground as Bart wrapped his own arms around him in turn.

  “What in the hell are you doing sitting up there with a rifle at this hour you crazy old man?” Eric asked when he let him go and stepped back to look him over.

  “Been having a problem with looters, what else? It’s been going on ever since the hurricane, and I sure thought you two were more of the same. Now you tell me; where in the hell did you come from and how’d you get here? And who’s your buddy you’ve got with you?”

  “This kid? Oh, this is just Jonathan.” Eric slapped Jonathan on the back. “I don’t even know his last name. Have you got a last name, Jonathan?”

  “Of course I do. It’s Coleman, not that it matters. You never told me yours either.” Jonathan turned back to Bart and extended his hand. “It’s good to meet you, sir. I’ve heard a lot about you from Eric.”

  Bart shook it as he looked him over, not quite sure what to make of the boy. It was obvious he wasn’t someone that had been working with Eric overseas, but at least he was respectful.

  “He’s just a beach bum I picked up on the coast near Jupiter Inlet,” Eric grinned. “When I first met the punk, he tried to steal my kayak, but he's all right. He's a pretty good paddler and a helluva fisherman. He helped me sail a little Catalina 25 all the way around from Jupiter to the Keys and up to Fort Myers.”

  “What are you doing in that kayak then? Didn’t have an engine on the Catalina?”

  “We did, and enough gas to get up here too, but I didn’t figure they would let us through the blockade, so we didn’t ask. I didn’t have any more use for the boat anyway, and it was pretty rough, so we set it adrift.”

  “Blockade? What blockade are you talking about?”

  “The one at Fort Myers. Right there at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee. You didn’t know about it?”

  “No. That’s the first I’ve heard of it. They must have done that after the hurricane, because until it hit, there were still folks coming upriver from the Gulf looking for a place to haul-out before it got here.”

  “What about Megan, Dad? Is she here with you?”

  Bart saw the desperate hope in his son’s eyes. This was the real reason he was here, and
Bart hated to have to break the bad news to him. “No, I’m sorry son, she’s not. When I knew for sure that the hurricane was going to hit us here in south Florida, I got in the truck and drove over there to Shauna’s house to see if I could get them out. I was lucky to make it through, to tell you the truth, but when I got there, Shauna said she hadn't heard from Megan all summer and that as far as she knew, she was still in Colorado. I went ahead and brought Shauna and Daniel and his boy with me, because I knew it wasn’t safe for them to stay there that close to the Atlantic. They’re up at the house right now and have been ever since. That Daniel is about to drive me crazy with his wanting to go back to check on his house, but I've been telling him things over there are a hell of a lot worse than they are here. They may not have gotten a direct hit where they lived, but it had to be close, considering the path that hurricane took through here.”

  Eric took the news about Megan as if he’d already expected it. Bart knew he’d been hoping, but his son had seen plenty of disappointment in his life, and surely was prepared for more of the same. “You're right about the damage, Dad. I've been there. I went straight to Shauna’s house as soon as I got to the coast. The house wasn’t destroyed, but it's uninhabitable and it’s been broken into and looted. Hell, the entire neighborhood has been looted and now it’s deserted. There's no power anywhere over there and it is extremely dangerous to be out and about, even traveling by water at night.”

  Bart wasn’t really surprised when Eric briefly related what he’d witnessed from right under Shauna’s dock that night before he left the neighborhood. It had to be bad in places with that many desperate survivors, because it had been bad enough here. He told Eric of the incident right here in the yard, when thieves who took a motor yacht from one of the wet slips murdered his two long-time employees while he was away. Others had come after them, but Bart had been ready and waiting, just like tonight.

  “So what’s the story of that sneaky-looking black kayak that almost got you shot? Where’d you get it, son? And how did you get back from over there, wherever in the hell you’ve been working lately?”

  “Heck, I paddled back, old man. What’d you think I did?”

  Bart just laughed. “Knowing you, I about half believe it.”

  “I probably could have, if I’d had enough time. That thing can handle rough water like you wouldn’t believe! But seriously, from the few reports I managed to get about what was happening here, I knew it was time to get my ass back ASAP. From what I could gather of the situation here, I figured I was going to need stuff that wouldn’t be easy to bring in, if you know what I mean.” Eric patted the rifle slung at his side and nodded at the one Jonathan carried. “A while back, I did a job where we used the kayaks to sneak into the coast, and it worked out well. I liked it so much I kept that one as part of my bonus for the operation and had it packed away in storage ever since. When I decided it was time to come home, I worked out a deal with a petroleum company to do a security hitch on one of their tankers in exchange for my passage. They agreed to drop me off near the east coast close to Jupiter, so the kayak was perfect. I’d heard all the ports were locked down anyway, even if I hadn’t needed to slip my stuff in, and you probably know flying wasn’t an option.”

  “Well I’ll be damned. Leave it to you to figure out something as clever as that. Just so you know though, as sneaky as that thing may be, I had you in my sights long before you even landed. I could have taken you out before you touched the bank if I’d wanted to.”

  “I’m sure you could have, but not everybody’s hardcore enough to sit up all night watching the river with an M1-A. I guess it’s a good thing you had the courtesy to wait and catch us in the act before pulling the trigger.”

  “It’s been my policy ever since this crap started. No reason to change that now. By the way, I’ve got a couple of kayaks now myself as of last night. Got ’em off a couple of fellows that stopped by around midnight, that’s why when I saw you coming, I thought it was a new trend. They’re nothing fancy, like yours, but the price was right.”

  “How many rounds?”

  “I don’t know, half a dozen? Who’s counting anyway? I’ve got plenty more where those came from.”

  Eric grinned, but then his face turned serious as Bart opened up his office and flipped on the 12-volt-powered lighting. He could see that Eric’s thoughts had returned to his daughter again, as she was the reason he was here.

  “You said Shauna hasn’t heard from Megan all summer? Have the phones really been down that long?”

  “The cellular networks have. I don’t know about all landlines, but how would you ever reach a kid on a landline these days anyway? Most Internet access was shut down too, but there were still ways to communicate, at least before the hurricane hit. They couldn’t shut down ham radio, and that’s what most of us were using, but that didn’t do Megan any good, if she even thought about it. I doubt she knew anyone out there with a station.”

  “From what Jonathan’s told me and the rumors I’d heard before I got here, driving out there’s not really an option, is it Dad?”

  “No, not at all. You’d never make it through, not traveling that far…when it first started, maybe… but not now. Even if you tried to stay on back roads all the way and avoided most of the checkpoints, you couldn’t count on getting gas. And if you tried to carry enough with you for a trip like that, you’d be a prime target everywhere you went. Shauna and I have talked about it every day. Of course she would like to go and get Megan, but she understands how unrealistic that is right now. She’d been hoping Megan would show up all summer, but since the hurricane hit, she’s hoping she stays put.

  “What in the hell has become of this country, Dad? How did it come to this just since I was here last? What was it, a year and half ago?”

  “About that, I reckon. You know as well as I do that it’s been building up a lot longer than that, though. It’s been like a pot about to boil over, the lid rattling under the pressure of the steam, until finally, it just blows off.”

  “There was more to it than a bunch of protesters starting riots on college campuses though. There had to be instigators behind it, fueling the fire.”

  “Of course there was. They knew if they could push the right people hard enough, the bullets were going to start flying. It was like waking a sleeping giant. All those folks that normally would have just ignored it and tried to go on about their business finally didn’t have a choice anymore, not when it got so that they couldn’t do business. The whole economy began to collapse when it got to where people couldn’t go to work. Stuff started disappearing off the shelves and the faster it went, the crazier the mobs got. They were burning entire cities and nobody could stop them. Restricting travel and communications was the best attempt the feds could make and it might have done some good, but it hurt everyone, not just the troublemakers. I don’t have to tell you, son. You’ve been dealing with it in Europe.”

  “Yeah all that stuff and more, on top of the endless attacks by jihadists bent on taking the world back to the Middle Ages.”

  “There’s been plenty of that here too; all kinds of mayhem carried out by terrorists taking advantage of the confusion, fear and disruption created by the anarchists. They were feeding off of each other, keeping law enforcement spread so thin they couldn’t possibly respond to all of it. Who knows the full extent of it? I haven’t heard anything outside the local area since the hurricane hit. Now isn’t that something, getting clobbered by a major hurricane on top of all that other crap? I don’t think this part of Florida will recover from it, to be honest with you.”

  “I agree, and that’s why it’s time to get out. I came here to find Megan and do just that. I was going to come here anyway, even if I found her at the house in North Palm Beach. I wanted to get you, and Shauna and her new family too if they wanted to go, and get as far away from this mess as possible. I figured you’d have a good boat on the hard here or know where one was, and then we’d get outfitted and set sail. Now i
t looks like all that has changed with Megan still in Colorado. I can’t sail there, so I guess I’m going to have to come up with another plan.”

  “You could go most of the way to the Rockies in the kayak,” Jonathan said. “You’d have to paddle up the coast to the Mississippi River and then turn left at St. Louis. I read about some guys that did a trip like that, following the route of Lewis and Clark. It would probably take you a freakin’ year to do it though.”

  “Way longer than I have, that’s for sure.”

  “The boy’s got a point though,” Bart said. “Just because you can’t sail to Colorado, that don’t mean you can’t go a good part of the way by boat. If you could get across the Gulf to Louisiana and up to Keith’s place, that would be a start. Last time I talked to Keith he said they were running a lot a barges up the Atchafalaya from the Gulf. With all the refineries on the Texas coast there was still gas there earlier this summer, and the safest way to move it north to the rest of the country was by river. But if the hurricane hit hard up there, things may have changed.”

  “You haven’t talked to him since the storm, have you? From what I understood from the fellow we chatted with by VHF in Florida bay, the hurricane apparently went straight across the Gulf and made landfall in Louisiana. You can bet that stuff got messed up in Keith’s AO if it did. He said they’d sailed from Bay St. Louis, and that the entire region was pretty torn up.”