EMP Strike Series | Book 4 | End Game, page 1
part #4 of EMP Strike Series Series
End Game
EMP Apocalypse Survival Thriller - Book 4 of 4 in the EMP Strike Series
Bo Thunboe
Published in 2021 by Weston Press, LLC
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, organizations, places, events, or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Brian D. Moore
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-949632-14-9 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-949632-15-6 (trade paperback)
Weston Press, LLC
Naperville, IL
www.thunboe.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Bo Thunboe
1
Dan stopped to rest, standing on railroad tracks which descended the side of the hill in a long sweeping curve, the rails shining in the cool sunlight of this clear fall day. The hill rose to the left and dropped steeply down into a valley to his right, the tops of the trees way below him.
He admired the view as he worked his stainless steel water bottle out of the sleeve on the side of his pack. He took a long drink, wiped the drips from his mouth, and put the bottle away.
He’d made good progress. From New Cairo’s trading partners and the travelers who visited, he knew where the major communities north of them were located and had avoided all of them. Six days into his trip home and the only sign he’d seen of humanity was an occasional column of smoke in the distance. But now he was past the limits of his information and had to be more careful.
He started down the hill, walking between the rails, long strides to land on every other railroad tie. In a few more weeks he’d be home, back in the house where he and Mary had raised Sean and Erin. The house holding the memories slipping away from him as he got old. He wanted those memories back before the end he felt coming for him.
“What do we got here, boys?”
Dan froze. He’d violated his own cardinal rule to always be present when out in the After because letting your mind wander was a sure way to get killed. He wasn’t scared of death but he first wanted to get home and remember.
Four men sat in the shadows of a little clearing among the trees just uphill of the tracks. They didn’t have a fire going but leaned back on large packs, resting. Not packs, meat wrapped in hides. He smelled it now, raw and thick. The one who’d spoken popped up and bounded down the hill and up onto the rail bed. Tall and gangly with thick black hair and the wispy beard of a teen, he wore a large knife sheathed on his belt, the handle made of well-polished antler. A hunting knife, but also a weapon.
Dan stepped back, snaking his right hand up under his coat to grip the hilt of his dagger. Its sheath hung upside down on a strap looped over the back of his neck, the handle just above the bottom hem of his coat. He kept the knife sharp in case he had to use it.
But he didn’t want to kill ever again.
He released the handle.
The other three men followed their leader up onto the tracks, fanning out around Dan. The two with bows nocked arrows and the one with the spear pointed it at Dan. He didn’t blame them. A stranger should always be considered dangerous in the After. The youngest of them—blond and pale with small hands that gripped the spear so tightly his knuckles showed white—was likely born after the Pulse. The two archers might now be leaving their teens behind and both had arrows nocked on their strings. Boys in the Before, but men here in the after.
Dan raised his hands to keep them away from the knife and any temptation to use it. His generation had given them the Pulse and the After; he wasn’t going to send them out of it.
“Where you going, Traveler?”
Dan relaxed slightly at Black Hair’s use of that label. Travelers were respected and usually left alone to spread the news they carried. “I’m just passing through. Heading north.”
“From where you come?” Black Hair asked.
“New Cairo, down at—”
“The people making beer and whiskey?”
“That’s right.” New Cairo’s farm grew more grain than they could eat so they made beer and whiskey. They were valuable trade goods.
“Did you get a taste while you was there?” Black Hair circled Dan, his men stepping back to let him pass, then filling back in, the stone ballast of the rail bed crunching under their feet. They didn’t feel dangerous, just curious and bored like a typical teenager back in the Before.
“I had some of the beer. I’ve never cared for whiskey.”
“We’d drink whatever they got,” said one of the archers.
Dan didn’t look at him. Black Hair was the leader and nothing would happen without his say so.
“You bring some with you?” Black Hair asked. “To trade?”
“No.” Dan’s shoulders were starting to ache. He lowered them slowly and had them halfway down when Black Hair pulled his knife, the schwingggg of the blade ringing clear as it left the sheath.
Dan reacted, muscle memory pulling his dagger without conscious thought.
“Christ!” Blondie jumped back, then came forward again, jabbing the air with his spear. “Don’t move that flipping hand, mister.”
Now Dan felt the dagger’s slender handle in his hand. Black Hair’s eyes grew wide at the pressure of the dagger’s point at the front of his coat. One thrust and the man was dead and he knew it.
Dan looked around at the others. The archers both had their bows raised and arrows back and Blondie had his spear aimed at Dan. They were not seasoned fighters and stood way too close to him, trembling with adrenaline. He could impale Black Hair, swing him around and let his body block the arrows. He doubted either archer would shoot straight after seeing their leader impaled on the end of the dagger. Then he’d push Black Hair into Blondie and go at them all with his knife. It would be over in seconds.
But he was the one in the wrong here. A stranger in their hunting territory who’d lowered his hands as if going for his weapon. Black Hair only pulled his knife to defend himself and his friends. Dan would not kill them.
Dan dropped the knife and lifted his hands again.
“Damn right.” Black Hair stepped back and with one eye on Dan picked up the dagger and held it dangling from two fingers.
“Look at that thing!” Blondie widened his stance.
“I’m just passing through,” Dan said. “I’ve got no—”
“Travelers don’t carry stabbing knives like this one.” Black Hair licked his lips, and took a step back.
“He’s got another knife on his belt, Cole. As fast as he moved—”
“Shut it,” Black Hair—Cole—said. He stood straighter, rubbing his beard with his free hand. “You are wicked fast for a gray-hair. Take it off.”
Dan unbuckled his belt and slid the sheath knife off and dropped it on the ground. He started to re-buckle.
“No!” Cole walked around Dan. “Take it all off. Everything. Every damn thing. I want you standing naked in front of us.”
“It’s kind of cold—”
“Just effen do it, mister.”
Dan did as they demanded, wondering where this was going. There were still people this deep into the After who ate human flesh, but these boys were hunters, not cannibals. When he stood naked, the rough stones of the railbed ballast biting into his bare feet, Cole looked satisfied, nodding and smiling.
He pointed down the tracks. “Go on then, traveler. Travel.”
Dan looked down at the pile of his belongings. The food and water and clothes and knives he needed to get home. He grimaced, looked at Cole and registered the determination there.
“I have some photos in my coat pocket.” They were so worn and faded they were nearly illegible, but sometimes could still pull a memory out of his aging brain. “If you let me have that one thing I’ll go.”
“You
Dan looked at the pile, then at each of the men. Blondie was staring at Dan’s genitals.
“This old bastard’s gray everywhere,” Blondie said.
“Go on. Git.” Cole pointed again, the flat of his blade flashing in the sun.
Dan took a last look at his coat where the photos lay nestled in his pocket and started walking, slowly, keeping his bare feet on the railroad ties. Sometimes failing and a rough chunk of rock ripping his skin. Behind him the boys whispered and laughed, but their voices faded. There were at least a dozen photo albums back home in the bookcase by the fireplace and he would plant himself there and look through every one of them.
If he made it home.
2
Gretchen parked her bike and waited in the sun at the entrance to Cress Creek. When noon rolled around a member of the Chosen would arrive to evaluate visitors and escort those he deemed “worthy” to their worship center. Trying to enter the Chosen’s territory at any other time or at any other point around their perimeter resulted in violence and punishment.
Gretchen was sure she’d be the only visitor. The Chosen creeped out most people. She wasn’t bothered by how they looked because she saw worse in her own mirror and she ignored religion when she could.
A short while later—ten minutes or twenty—a bicycle rolled down Royal Saint George.
“Here we go.” Gretchen straightened up to her full five-foot three, shoulders back, hands visible and empty at her sides. She shivered and blamed it on the breeze, then admitted to herself that these people were a little creepy.
The bike slowed, brakes squeaking as it came to a stop. She recognized its rider, Bud, from the dark bumpy growth on the left side of his face. A chunk of it had been rubbed off recently and a dark red scab crusted over the spot. She winced, thinking how the scar on her own face was easily damaged and slow to heal.
“Hello, Sheriff.” Bud greeted her as he got off his bike. “I’m guessing you’re here to visit Sister Ruth?”
“Yes, Bud.” The first time Gretchen met their leader, Sister Ruth hadn’t even shared her name, saying; “My name is not important. Our name is the Chosen.” Gretchen’s pulse jumped. Her experiences with religious fanatics taught her they were unpredictable and dangerous because they could twist the scriptures to justify anything they wanted to do. But the Chosen kept to themselves and within a few months the two communities were trading together. And last spring they signed the Joint Defense Agreement, which they had yet to use. Until now.
Bud looked at his watch.
“Not yet noon?” she asked.
“Two minutes.” Bud wheeled his bike over and leaned it against a tree. “You’ll have to leave your weapons here. The nightstick and the knife and any others on your person.”
She smiled because few people considered her nightstick a weapon. He smiled in response, his lesion distorting the effort into a ghoulish and lopsided mask. She knew her own smile didn’t look any better. She followed him and hung her nightstick over a branch by its short handle. It was made of oak and had once been painted black, the paint now gouged from use and worn through where she held it. She pulled her knife out of its sheath and stabbed it into the tree next to the nightstick.
Bud checked his watch again. “After you, Sheriff.” He gestured for her to walk ahead of him but she knew the way and was already moving.
Soon after the Chosen arrived, Gretchen and the New Weston council walked up this road after accepting an invitation to attend a Sunday service. A series of people spoke from the podium, reading from the Bible and applying the lesson to the world before the Pulse, the event itself, and life in the After. The Chosen were Old Testament people, which Gretchen had never read, so she couldn’t follow their interpretations and her attention wandered. It was the first time she’d seen so many of them together in one place and she noticed there wasn’t a single child in the room and that a lot of the people had skin lesions and other deformities.
When the service broke for lunch, each of the New Weston visitors had been assigned an escort. Gretchen’s host was a young woman with a tumor on her neck and thin, flaccid, blond hair. Gretchen immediately asked where the children were.
“We don’t have any children,” Hannah had said, blushing, “No babies have survived and the children we did have…”
“Yes?”
Hannah’s hands found each other and her long slim fingers intertwined, then her knuckles whitened as her hands clenched.
Gretchen waited.
“The radiation killed them. We lived in Byron near where the nuclear power plant was. We didn’t know the Pulse did something to it and the radiation leaked out and started to change us.” Hannah pointed to her tumor. “Just on the inside at first, that’s why we didn’t notice anything and move.”
“But you stayed there for twelve or thirteen years?”
Hannah winced. “Sister Ruth told me to tell you, but I don’t like talking about it.”
“Take your time.”
Hannah took a deep breath, then unclenched her hands. “Our leader back then—Brother Mathias—said it was God’s invisible fire that would cleanse us and prepare us for life in the After.”
“So he knew the radiation was poisoning you and kept you there.”
“No. He knew the radiation was cleansing and preparing us. But then he died and Sister Ruth pulled the veil from our eyes and we saw that we were chosen to endure and prevail. Which we had done. Now it was time to go forth and start anew.”
Gretchen remembered smiling at the girl’s earnest recitation of words so obviously programmed into her.
Bud darted ahead as Gretchen walked up under the portico of the old clubhouse and stopped her there with a hand on her shoulder. He was harmless, so she didn’t shake it off. A moment later Sister Ruth came out through the glass doors. She was short and curvy and had a spread of freckles across the bridge of her nose and along her cheekbones. She had no obvious defects, but moved so slowly and deliberately Gretchen suspected she had a cancer eating away deep inside of her.
“Welcome, Sheriff. May the good Lord bless you and yours.”
“Yes, uh…thank you. I’m here to—”
A tall man stepped through the doorway and stood off Sister Ruth’s shoulder. He was in his early thirties, with wide shoulders and huge hands. Gretchen recognized him instantly. She’d been in Radar Grove looking into a hermit sighting and run into him carrying a string of catfish. The memory brought the oily taste of boiled catfish to her mouth. She hated catfish.
“Good afternoon, fisherman.” He’d lost a lot of weight since that afternoon in the Grove and his enormous hands now looked almost skeletal, the knuckles bulbous.
Sister Ruth glanced at him, then back at Gretchen. “John is now our constable.”
“Then he should hear this, too.”
Sister Ruth frowned. “Please come to my office.”
Gretchen followed her inside and down the hall to an office with a tall bank of windows looking over a harvested field that had once been part of the golf course. Sister Ruth sat behind the desk, the constable at her elbow, and motioned for Gretchen to take a chair across from her. Gretchen strode to the window instead. This was not a time for sitting.
“Have you heard of the Blue?”
