The Savage Darkness (Darkness After Series Book 4) Page 17

  She decided to cross all four lanes first and deliberately leave an obvious trail on the other side. If the men and dogs followed her this far, she wanted them to think she’d continued on west of the highway. Once she was across the median however, Lisa saw from the southbound lanes a sign at the top of the next hill that told her where she was. It was an official green highway with the posted mileage to Wiggins and Gulfport, two cities that Highway 49 connected. Now she knew this was Highway 49 and could see the distance to Wiggins on the sign, she knew she was south of Brooklyn, and therefore, the creek.

  After leaving her false trail that went into the woods a couple hundred yards west of the highway, Lisa carefully doubled back to the pavement and began jogging north. She knew her trick wouldn’t fool the dogs if they were still on her trail, but it might slow them down yet again. But she’d still heard no further barking all day, and was beginning to hope she’d eluded pursuit. She ran as long as she had a good sight line of the highway ahead and could see that it was deserted. When she knew she had covered at least three miles from where she left the woods, she slowed to a walk and continued at that pace until well after dark. She knew she had made it to Black Creek when she came to a long downhill stretch of the roadway with a long bridge at the bottom.

  When she reached the creek bank at last, less than a quarter mile from Mr. Holloway’s camp on the other side where her ordeal began, she kept to the cover of the woods on the south bank and made her way downstream of Brooklyn. Black Creek would take her all the way home, though it would be slow going, following its meanderings on foot. She had made it though and nothing would stop her now. The creek would provide food and water to see her through the coming days, and eventually she would reach the new campsite below the Henley farm.

  * * *

  By mid-morning the day after his encounter with the two men and their dogs, Mitch found the place where they’d given up the chase and turned back. Lisa’s trail continued west though, and he concluded that the two men he’d killed must have been exhausted by this point and decided she wasn’t worth it. Seeing that she had outpaced and outsmarted both them and their dogs made Mitch proud of his little sister. Her woodcraft skills were on par with his own at that age, and not all that far behind even now. He was confident she would make it home if she could pull off an escape like that. But he wanted to know for sure, of course, so he stayed on her trail, wondering how far west she had gone before changing course. He hoped it wasn’t much farther because she was a long way from home.

  When he came to Highway 49, her false trail on the other side of it threw him off for 20 minutes, but then he grinned as he realized what she’d done. It had been a bold move, traveling on the paved highway that had at times been crawling with both refugees and desperadoes, but he figured she’d done it to rapidly gain distance on a surface that would leave no visible tracks. Mitch knew where he was on 49 as soon as he crossed it, and he was sure Lisa must have traveled it north to Black Creek. A search of the creek bank when he arrived there before sunset confirmed it.

  For the next two days, he wound his way downstream along the creek, finding evidence of her passing here and there. She was headed for home, and he knew she’d be there when he arrived. The long hike gave him plenty of time to think about all the mistakes he’d made over the past weeks. It began with his carelessness that day in Brooklyn when Mr. Holloway’s rifle bullet narrowly missed his head. It continued with the huge risk he’d taken riding alone to the gates of Purvis, trusting that he would be treated as an honest man arriving to trade, rather than a common thief on a stolen horse carrying stolen guns. Mitch was sure he would still be in that awful jail if Sheriff Macon hadn’t personally known his father. And to top off all that, he’d put his sister in extreme danger by letting her go along with him. And now Mr. Holloway was dead because she stopped at his camp, probably distraught over Mitch not returning from Purvis when he was supposed to. All the way around, Mitch had made a string of bad decisions that led to unpleasant consequences.

  The experience in Purvis also reinforced what he should have already known—that he and his friends were better off staying hidden in the forest and avoiding contact with others as much as possible. Getting the medicine he’d obtained had helped Kimberly and Benny, but they might have gotten well without it. He couldn’t make all the decisions for the whole group, but he was going to strongly suggest that they avoid such excursions again unless it was a dire emergency with no other options. The world beyond their little hideaway was a savage place where treachery and death lurked at every turn. All he wanted at the moment was to get back there and find Lisa safe. Then he intended to stay close to home and focus on improving their living conditions, getting everyone up to speed with their hunting and woodcraft skills, and spending quality time with April, the girl he loved. It was going to take extraordinary circumstances indeed to separate the two of them again, although he did plan to make a quick trip back to that house on the gravel road to get the horses and guns he’d left behind.

  Lisa’s trail led him all the way back to camp, and when Mitch finally arrived he saw her immediately when he hailed the group from the other side of the creek to get a ride across in one of the canoes. He thought she would be as overjoyed to see him as he was to find her safely there, but there was a sadness in her eyes that he mistook for sorrow over what happened to Mr. Holloway. Tears were streaming down her face as she squeezed him tight, trying to tell him something but managing only sobs at first.

  “It’s okay, Lisa. It’s going to be okay. I know what you went through, but you’re here, and you’re safe now.”

  “It’s not that, Mitch”

  “I know about Mr. Holloway, Lisa. I’m so sorry, but it’s not your fault. It could have happened to him any day out there by himself like that.”

  “No, Mitch. You don’t understand. Mama’s dead, Mitch. Our mama died in Texas!”

  Mitch was stunned as Lisa took him by one hand and April the other and they led him up the hill to the lean-to. What April had told him next after Lisa delivered her terrible news had him reeling. His father had been here! Just a couple of days ago, he’d arrived at the farm after nearly a year since Mitch had last seen him. But now he was gone again, off in search of him and Lisa, and according to Benny, and planning to go all the way to Purvis if he didn’t find them in Brooklyn at Mr. Holloway’s camp. Hearing this, Mitch realized he could have passed within miles of his dad while tracking Lisa back home, and might have missed him in Brooklyn by mere hours, depending on what his father made of the sign he found there. By now, he’d likely already be in Purvis if he decided to continue on there. At least he had a friend there in the sheriff, if the goons at the gates didn’t shoot him before asking who he was.

  Knowing now for sure that his mother was dead after he’d long feared they both were hit him like a blow as he sat there listening to everyone tell him what his dad had told them. She had been killed early on when they were still in Houston. Their plane had barely made it to the runway when the devastating pulse hit, but though they were alive, they found themselves stranded in a major city with no easy way out. His dad didn’t even have his service weapon, and they had nothing to eat or drink until he figured out a way to get what they needed. Just as Mitch figured from what he’d seen in New Orleans and Hattiesburg, the violence in Houston began less than 24 hours after the initial event. His dad told them he had volunteered to help with local law enforcement in exchange for shelter and food for the two of them. That had kept them safe for a while, but inevitably, the police forces there were overwhelmed when no help came from the National Guard or elsewhere. His mom had been killed while his dad was out working with a local agency, the station where they’d been staying overrun by the mobs just a couple of weeks after it all began.

  “If mom was killed way back then, why did it take dad so long to get here?” Mitch asked. “Did he say what he was doing all that time? I know it’s a long way, but still…. he could have walked here in a month
easily.”

  “Oh he said, all right,” Benny answered. “I’m sure there’s some details he left out because he was anxious to set out after you and Lisa, and you’ll get the rest straight from him when you see him. But it’s fresh on my mind right now, if you wanna hear it. It’s a little long though, so you’d best sit back and get comfortable.”

  * * *

  Thank you for reading The Savage Darkness. I hope you enjoyed it. Turn the page to learn more about The Darkness After Series and to read a sample from my other series.

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  The Darkness After

  Into the River Lands

  The Forge of Darkness

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  If you enjoyed The Savage Darkness, you may enjoy reading The Pulse Series, set in the same grid-down world. Turn the page to read a sample excerpt from: Voyage After the Collapse

  Book III of The Pulse Series

  Voyage After the Collapse Excerpt

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY Scott B. Williams

  Chapter One

  Tara Hancock made her decision and she intended to stick to it. Sure, it was risky, but everything she did in this new reality entailed risk and danger. By now she’d come to realize that she had to take chances almost daily if she and Rebecca were to survive. Today the risk was different though, because it was not about the two of them and she could have just as well chosen to mind her business and stay put. She and her daughter were relatively safe for now and she could keep it that way, leaving her less fortunate neighbors to fend for themselves. She had tried to help them after all, even if she had failed. But the Owens reminded her too much of her parents for her to leave them stranded. Like her mom and dad, they were too old and frail to hold their own in the midst of the violence they had escaped for now by coming here. Tara couldn’t do anything for her parents now, as they were impossibly far away, but there was one more thing she could try that might help Mike and Lillian Owens, and she was determined to do it.

  She knew that she and her daughter were lucky to have the means to be where they were, anchored safely off the north side of Cat Island. Several miles of water separating the chain of barrier islands from the coast provided a safety buffer between them and the madness ashore, but it would not do to stay here long-term. The distance from the mainland simply wasn’t enough, especially if the situation everywhere didn’t improve fast. At this point there was no reason to believe it would, so Tara knew that if she expected to keep her daughter safe, they had to keep moving.

  As long as they had the Sarah J., her parents’ restored Tartan 37 sailboat, they could do that. The small yacht was well stocked and meticulously maintained, and could take them almost anywhere while providing a comfortable place to live at the same time. The Owens were aboard a somewhat larger sailing vessel, and with their deeper draft and inadequate ground tackle, they had found themselves hard aground on the shoals near the island after a line of thunderstorms blew through the night before.

  Tara had tried to help them get off the submerged sandbar into which their keel was firmly buried, but the Sarah J. was only equipped with a small auxiliary diesel, and her attempts to pull the heavier yacht back to deep water were futile. It was going to take more horsepower to do the job, but in the wake of the collapse, there was no marine towing service to call, even if they still had a means to do so. They spent the morning trying various angles with anchors and the onboard winches to pull the heavy Catalina 42 off, but every attempt failed. Tara was completely out of ideas aside from attempting to contact the people aboard the other two boats that she knew were anchored around the point on the south side of the island.

  One had arrived a couple of days before the second one showed up, but it was this second one that gave her some hope of getting the Owens’ yacht afloat again. Though it appeared to be heavily damaged when it chugged past them on the way to the other side, the old wooden shrimp trawler apparently had a reliable engine. Like her parents’ classic Tartan 37, the trawler was clearly old enough and simple enough that its engine’s starting ability was unaffected by the electromagnetic pulse from the solar flare. Tara knew too that the engine in such a vessel would be many times more powerful than a little sailboat pusher. Named after her mother, the Sarah J. was a sailing vessel, after all; not a power boat. The engine was needed to enter and leave marinas and tricky inlets, but otherwise the wind provided the means for really going places.

  “I’ll be careful, I can assure you,” Tara told Mike Owens when he tried to talk her out of her latest idea.

  “You can’t be careful enough these days. You know that by now. You never know about folks like that. They went around to the other side of the island for a reason. It looks to me like they want to be left alone.”

  “Maybe they just anchored in Smuggler’s Cove because they could. I know catamarans don’t draw much water, and most shrimp boats don’t either.” Tara was familiar with Smuggler’s Cove, a shallow anchorage on the south side of Cat Island, because she had sailed there with her parents on the Sarah J. years before. While it was off-limits to many deeper-draft sailboats like the Owens’ Wind Shadow, the Sarah J., with her keel-centerboard configuration, drawing barely over four feet with the board up, could get in there just fine. Tara would have anchored there when she and Rebecca first arrived at Cat Island, but she knew the old paper charts on board were outdated since Hurricane Katrina and she was afraid the storm had altered the depths there. For all she knew at the time, there could be sunken wrecks or other manmade debris from the hurricane, hidden by the murky brown waters of the sound where many such obstructions awaited the unsuspecting mariner. Her parents had been using an electronic chart plotter for all their cruising in recent years, but like all electronic devices, that was useless to her now, so she had erred on the side of caution and anchored in deeper waters off the north side of the island. Maybe the strangers had better charts, or maybe they simply weren’t worried about it because their boats drew even less than hers. Whatever the reason they were there, Tara didn’t think it automatically meant they were up to no good. Maybe they were just as afraid as everyone else.

  “I won’t get too close if they seem threatening in any way,” Tara assured Mike Owens. “I’ll sail in close enough to speak to them and if they are unfriendly, I’ll head back out.”

  “If you don’t run aground first,” Mike said.

  “I’ll be careful, like I said. But I’ve got to try. That shrimp boat can pull you and Lillian off. I know it can, if they are just willing to do it. But if I don’t ask, it’s not going to happen. And who knows, they may leave any time.”

  Tara knew Mike and Lillian Owens were probably going to be in danger eventually anyway, whether the shrimp boat pulled them off the shoal or not. Mike had already said they weren’t leaving the immediate area, but Tara didn’t see how they could stay there. For one thing, there was no all-weather anchorage at any of the barrier islands, and even summer thunderstorms could wreak havoc, as had the one last night that caused them to drag anchor. A tropical storm or hurricane would be disastrous out there. But aside from that, Tara knew others would be making their way out to the islands one way or the other, and that might become a problem, especially if not all of them were simply seeking refuge. Some of them might see a big sailing yacht such as the Owens’ Wind Shadow as easy pickings—a source of food and supplies, shelter and transportation all in one. Looting, robbery and worse was already happening on the mainland they’d left behind. And Tara was certain it would soon be spre
ading everywhere, even to seemingly safe refuges like this. But she couldn’t tell Mike Owens and his wife what to do. All she could do was make this last attempt to help them get afloat, and if that worked at least they would have the ability to make a choice to stay or leave when the time came. If she could do that much for them, Tara knew she and Rebecca could sail away with a clear conscious.

  What she wanted to do was to go to a real island somewhere—an island surrounded by more ocean miles that would protect her and her daughter from the mobs and gangs that were running wild in the coastal cities. What island that would be and where, she wasn’t quite sure; but she thought maybe somewhere in the Bahamas would work. She knew she and Rebecca could get there, because her parents’ boat was capable of sailing most anywhere and since retirement they had cruised the islands each winter themselves. She just wished they could be here too, aboard the vessel they had worked so hard to refit and equip for those trips. But she tried not to think about it, because it only made her depressed. The truth was, she didn’t know when she’d ever see her mom and dad again, or if they were even still okay. She had escaped with her daughter in the nick of time and it was all because of their dream that she had the means to do so.