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  “How close are you, you son of a bitch? Or are you just messing with me?” she asked aloud. She decided that he was most likely closer than not, and it was now time to go as quickly as she could.

  “Daisy!” she called the dog up the stairs. The dog bounded up the stairs; ready to do anything that her master needed, especially if it involved a treat.

  “Daisy, on me!” The dog immediately circled Leah and stood next to her left leg.

  Satisfied with the dog on her heels, she quickly gathered whatever else she thought she would need from upstairs. She also loaded and strapped on the small Kel-Tec rifle that Grace loved so much. Leah liked the weapon too. At close to medium ranges, it was more accurate than a pistol and packed more punch by allowing the bullet to burn more efficiently before leaving the barrel. She found the extra clip and tucked it in her back pocket.

  Finally, when she though it was time to leave, she did one final thing. She placed a specially built dog vest on Daisy. The vest had been developed by Lewis; their friend that trained police dogs. It added a layer of protection for the dog and also allowed them to shoulder some of the weight from bugging out. In that vein, Leah placed two vacuum-sealed pouches of high protein dog food in the pockets that would last Daisy up to five days.

  Her last act was to go onto her front porch and take down the American flag. Once she had taken it down, she flipped the wooden pole around and put the empty stick back in its holder on the front porch. Besides the fact that she had taken down the flag, the end of the wooden pole, that now faced the street, was painted orange. It was the visual clue to other members of her family that she had bugged out safely.

  Now ready to leave her home for good, she took one more look around her neighborhood and saw three men walking down the street. She froze, and then slowly backed through the front door and gently closed and locked the door. Damn it! I was too slow!

  She watched the three men amble as if they owned the place. One of them broke the window of the abandoned car with a baseball bat as he walked by. He then opened the door and produced a bottle of some sort of soda from inside of the car. He took a sip and then threw the bottle into the street.

  The man next to him wore a red flannel shirt. He carried a shotgun and something else in his other hand. The third guy was dress in hunting cammo and also carried a shotgun. He was reading something as they walked…

  “He’s got the map!” Leah whispered. “Shit! That’s Grace’s map.”

  Flannel guy put his left hand to his mouth and Leah heard his voice speak through her radio. Fear coursed through her body causing sweat glands to jump-start.

  Leah sank to the floor with her back to the door. Her mind raced through what options she had. She checked a peek through the window and could see that the three men had stopped in the middle of the street directly in front of her house.

  “Shit!”

  Daisy sensed her master’s fear and nosed at her to do something.

  “Good girl,” Leah whispered, and then the voice came through the radio again.

  “We’re here!” Flannel guy said.

  Leah rolled away from the window and flipped the safety off on the Kel-Tec rifle. She was determined that they would not get into her house. She quietly climbed the stairs to her daughter’s second story bedroom window and peered out.

  “We see you!” the radio taunted.

  “Shit!” She ducked her head, half expecting the window to be blown out, but it wasn’t.

  “I see you in the kitchen. I’m glad we walked all this way, you’re one hot Jeep mama!”

  Leah looked at Daisy with confusion. She wasn’t in the kitchen; she was in her daughter’s bedroom. She decided to peek out the window again, and the men were gone. She scanned up and down the street, but they weren’t visible.

  “That’s not good,” she said, standing to a crouching position and looking out the window and down towards her front door to see if they were against the house. There was no sign of the men.

  “We’re coming in now…you don’t even hear us, do you?” Flannel taunted.

  Leah put it all together with the last transmission. “There at Amy’s house!” she whispered.

  She now trained her eyes to the house across the street from her own, remembering that the map could lead someone to this location, but it didn’t have a house number. Flannel and his gang had one of two choices once they reached the spot, and Amy’s house was presenting a better target.

  “Daisy, on me,” Leah said, reinforcing the command, and moving the rifle so that it was pointed in front of her. She moved down the stairs like she was part of a SWAT team.

  Once they were downstairs, Leah quietly opened the back door and she and the dog slipped out and around the side of the house that gave them the best line of sight to the house across the street. Once there, she waited and listened. She thought she heard glass breaking and knew that this was her chance to make it across the street without detection. She ran with the rifle pointed at the front of Amy’s house, the entire time she scanned the windows for shadows or movements. Daisy stayed exactly by her side the entire time. They were working as one, just as they had trained when Daisy was a puppy.

  The sound of a woman’s scream was haunting, and it sent a shiver of cold up Leah’s spine. But it also empowered her resolve. She felt the doorknob of the front door and gently turned it. It was open. She then cracked the door wide enough to let Daisy in.

  “Daisy, Go In. Attack! Attack!” she said twice as sharply as she could. The dog instantly obeyed and darted into the home, searching for someone that threated her master. She counted to two and followed the dog through the door.

  A man’s scream echoed through the house, followed by the growling and snarling of a vicious sounding dog. Leah was already in the front entrance of the house and moving toward the kitchen. Thankfully she had been in the house hundreds of times and knew the floor plan.

  She rounded a corner into the dining room.

  Snarling. Screaming.

  One more door before the kitchen.

  She could hear Amy screaming, Daisy snarling, one of the kids high pitch yelling and then she heard a gunshot and the loud yelp from her dog.

  Leah rounded the corner and visually acquired the man that shot Daisy. He was standing behind the table and turned his body and the barrel of the gun towards Leah while pumping the next shotgun shell into his chamber.

  Leah tapped the trigger of her rifle twice hitting the man in the chest with both of her 9mm rounds. He fell back through a pane of the sliding glass door.

  Leah then turned left and saw a man against the wall. He was the one with the baseball bat. Daisy lay motionless at his feet. The man made a move to lift his bat and charge Leah, but she fired twice before he could swing the bat. He collapsed beside the dog.

  Leah then turned right to see Amy, standing in the corner of the kitchen with a man behind her. He held a pistol to her head. Toby, her four-year-old son was clutched to her knee and was screaming a high pitch scream.

  “STOP!” he yelled before she could squeeze the trigger and unleash a double tap at him as well.

  Leah froze, but never took her aim off of the man. She had a relatively clean shot. They were close, perhaps 12 feet apart. She had made hundreds of shots at this range. But she had never shot a real moving person that was holding a gun on one of her friends, while a child was in front of the barrel of her gun.

  The child stopped screaming and sobbed into his mother’s jeans.

  “So,” Flannel said, “it looks like we picked the wrong house.”

  Leah sensed movement to her left, but didn’t want to take her eyes off of Flannel.

  “Where’s my daughter?” Leah asked, her voice harsh.

  Flannel narrowed his eyes at her, recognition and understanding filling his mind. “So, Jeep bitch was your daughter. Oh this just gets better! You know, your bitch of a daughter shot my brother before they got away.”

  Leah bit down words that she wanted to sa
y, but she had just learned something…Grace got away. “He probably deserved it.” So much for biting down words.

  “You’re a bitch! Just like your daughter!” He waved the gun up and down Amy’s head, trying to accentuate his speech. “We only wanted them to come down to our place and play a while. She had a working car, and it came with two cherries on top. That’s gold after a nuke goes off in Atlanta and planes fall out of the sky. This is a new world ladies, and there’s no one around to stop us from taking our piece of it.”

  Leah, again, sensed movement to her left, so she took a step to the right. Causing Flannel and Amy to pivot so that he could keep an eye on her.

  “Where’re you going? It’s not time to go, now that you’ve shot everybody. I think it’s time to settle the score a little.” He cocked his pistol with his thumb and pushed the barrel of the gun into Amy’s head.

  Damn it! Leah thought.

  “I think I only have one thing left to say and then I’m done talking with you,” Leah said, now splitting her attention with the movement on her left.

  “Yeah, bitch? What’s that?”

  Leah settled her breathing, “It’s… Daisy, Attack! Attack!”

  Flannel wheeled to his right to see the dog lunge at him. In one move, he flung Amy and Toby to the ground and drew his pistol out towards the dog, but he was too late.

  The dog was in the air, mouth open, teeth bared and was targeting his arm.

  Amy started falling to the ground, Leah squeezed the trigger twice and two 9mm rounds pierced Flannels heart, killing him before he hit the floor.

  “Daisy, HEEL!” The dog broke off her attack and ran to Leah. She was limping and whimpering in pain. “OK!” she said, releasing the dog from any further commands. “Good girl! Good girl!”

  Leah then collapsed to the floor and put her arms around Amy and her son.

  “Oh God! Oh God!” Amy kept saying. She was sobbing out of control. “Why is this happening? Why is this happening to us?””

  “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Anna watched Grace talking with Joshua and Bob in the other room as she sat still on a stool in Violet’s kitchen. Violet was digging through a large box marked bandages.

  “I think it is too late to suture the split on your nose, but we can at least use the right type of butterfly strips to limit the scarring,” she said, taking one package out of the box and reading the outside and then putting it back for another one.

  “Scarring? Really?”

  “Well, I have some really good cream that will take the pain away and help the skin heal. That will help.”

  “What is it?

  “It’s a little of this and a little of that. I like to compound my own medicines. I don’t really like what the big pharmacy companies make.”

  “Why? You don’t trust them?”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust them, it’s that they add things in the medicines that we really don’t need. So, I make my own.”

  “Huh,” Anna thought about that for a second. “My parents are doctors,” she said, and then felt the tears roll down her cheeks.

  Violet stopped looking through the box when she heard the girl sniff. “What’s wrong, dear?”

  Anna didn’t answer.

  “Where are your parents, dear?” Violet asked, putting her arm around the girl’s shoulders.

  Anna sniffed again and looked up into Violet’s eyes. “I think they’re dead,” she said, and burst into full on crying.

  Violet put both arms around the girl. The sounds of Anna crying brought Grace into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Anna, it’ll be okay,” she said, stroking the girl’s hair.

  “No it won’t!” Anna raised her voice, in between tears. “They’re dead, and they’re not coming back!”

  Grace opened her mouth to say something, but the motherly instinct of Violet beat her to it.

  “Anna, you and Grace are incredibly brave young ladies. heaven knows the hell you two went through last night.”

  “But…” Anna tried to speak, but Violet’s calming voice won out.

  “Shhh. Grace is right. It will be okay. In time, all wounds heal. But wounds as deep as this one will leave a scar. Scars can remind us. They can remind us of the people we love.”

  Anna hugged the lady she had barely known for an hour like she was her own grandmother.

  Grace left them alone in the kitchen and rejoined Bob and Joshua in the living room.

  “I haven’t been able to dial in anyone this morning on the short-wave radio,” Bob commented, as he listened with a headset on and dialed the knobs.

  “He was a radio operator in the Army,” Joshua added.

  “That was years ago, Grace, but it was a great skill to learn,” he said, also listening in on their conversation.

  “So, this is how you know things? The radio is how you got the news about the EMP and the two nukes?”

  Bob held a finger up that he was listening to something and trying to fine-tune the signal.

  “Yeah,” Joshua whispered. “Dad’s got a number of other guys around the world that are into radios. They’re called HAMs. There was a guy in Texas that told us he had heard that there might have been another EMP somewhere on the West Coast, and a guy in Minnesota that confirmed the Chicago nuke, and your friend down around the lake north of Columbus, GA. What’s his name Dad?”

  Bob didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he tried his dials one more time and then unplugged the earphones, leaving a light static playing on the external speaker. “There’s too much interference during the day anyway, and now with the radio waves bouncing around from the EMPs and nukes, we’re lucky to hear anything. What did you ask me?”

  “The guy on the lake in Georgia. What’s his name?”

  “Dukes, we served together in Desert Storm. Why?”

  “I was just telling Grace about your connections with the radio.”

  “A lot of good it’s doing us now. I guess we did get to help some people with it, though.”

  Grace sat down on the couch. She was getting impatient with the talking and wanted to find a way home, but she had to admit that if she was going to be stuck while Anna got doctored up, this wasn’t a bad place. She looked at Joshua again, and then reprimanded herself for loosing focus.

  “So how did you help others?” she asked, just keeping the conversation alive.

  Bob sat down in a large leather chair that looked as if it might be the most comfortable seat in the house. The chair fit his body perfectly. “Ah, well, last night, there was a fellow, an army officer and a lady from around here. They were in a plane crash, according to Dukes, and we filled them in on what was happening around Birmingham. He asked about the 280 corridor, but we could never get him a response because of the interference.”

  “The 280 corridor? That’s where I live. Dad calls it that all the time, when he’s not calling it the 280 log jam.”

  “So you live off of Highway 280, huh?” Bob asked,

  “Where is your dad, anyway? You said you were trying to get to your mom!” Joshua asked two questions at the same time.

  Grace sat back at the rapid-fire questions. She answered in order. “Ah, yes, Mr. Tiller, I do live off of 280, off Ridge View near the shopping area, across from the Jeep dealer.”

  “I know right where that is,” he said, and stood up and walked into another room. “I’ll be right back. Just going to get something.”

  Grace looked up at Joshua, who was still waiting for his answer.

  “Last I know, he was working out of town and supposed to fly home yesterday.”

  Joshua didn’t quite know how to react.

  “He’s not dead,” she added while standing. She was very sure of herself when she said it.

  “How…how can you be so sure?” he treaded gently.

  “You have to know my father. He has this crazy way of just knowing how to do things. He and Mom taught me everything I know about prepping, shooting
and just knowing how to survive. I bet he could survive almost anything.”

  “Is he in the Service?” Bob asked, reappearing from the other room with a large rolled up paper.

  “No sir, but he used to be,” she said, turning to address the man.

  “Is he a G-Man?” Bob, asked rolling a rubber band off the paper.

  “G-Man?” Grace was confused.

  “Does he work for the government? G, for the government. You know, the CIA or FBI. Something like that,” Joshua filled in.

  “Noooo, he works for a firearm manufacturer. He’s their VP of marketing,” she wondered if she needed to defend her father, or if they were respecting him for prepping her? Why?”

  The men traded looks across a table. Grace thought she saw a nod from Mr. Tiller to his son before Joshua started talking.

  “I guess we’re all asking ourselves not only why this happened, but how this could happen?” he asked, studying her reaction.

  Grace looked from one man to the other. “What do you mean? Isn’t this terrorism? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not exactly Grace,” Bob responded, he unrolled the paper across the table. “But, something this big just doesn’t happen without some sort of help from within. The other theory is that this is a state sponsored attack.”

  Grace took this in, careful to show her own ability to deduct a situation, so, she played dumb. “What do you mean by state sponsored attack?” She knew very well what it meant. She was a straight ‘A’ student in History and Current Events and how they both always came full circle.

  Anna and Violet joined them in the dining room. Both ladies took seats at the table. Anna had stopped crying, but she really didn’t look better. Her left eye was almost completely swollen shut and her nose was black as tar. The white bandage strips looked like rungs in a ladder climbing her nose.

  “State, being the Russians or the Chinese,” Bob said, flatly. “I don’t think the worlds run of the mill terrorist groups have the horsepower to pull something like this off!”

  The Russians had increasingly been testing American resolve in their former Soviet states. They had also been testing our ready defenses repeatedly for the last year or so by ‘accidently’ flying into our air space along the Alaskan coast. Grace followed the news outlets from both sides of the aisle in order to find her own opinion…something that her parents tried to instill in her.