An Apocalypse Family (Book 1): Family Reunion Read online

  I searched my mind for everything I’d heard about the South African Flu. I knew the mortality rate was extremely high, but I also thought I remembered hearing that most victims succumbed to death within the first 24 hours. Max said she started showing symptoms at ten o’clock the night before. All I could do at that point was wait while my mind wandered.

  I need to finish shoring up the windows and doors before it gets dark… We need to go back to the ferry to get the rest of the weapons and ammunition…

  I went to check on Lisa again, jolted back to reality by her coughing. She was paler than before, her eyes were sunken back in the sockets, and she was still burning up.

  I have to cool her down somehow. I know we need the water to drink, but if I can’t break this fever, she’s going to die, and soon. The decision made, I started stripping off her clothes.

  “Lisa, I have to get you undressed and get you into the bathtub.”

  She opened her eyes but didn’t seem to focus on me. I got her down to her underwear after much contorting of limbs and embarrassed fumbling on my part. She was as light as a feather.

  It is like carrying a burning piece of charcoal, I thought to myself as I made my way down the hall to the bathroom. The water wasn’t cold, but it was much cooler than she was. I lay her gently in the tub, making sure to keep my hand behind her head. I took her temp again: 104!

  Come on Lisa, fight this thing!

  I spent the next two hours stirring water and swishing it over her hair, not sure if it was accomplishing anything.

  I heard Max call out, “Ryan?”

  “We’re back here, in the back bathroom.”

  He came in wiping the sleep from his eyes, looking like hell.

  “Any change?” he asked.

  “Here, switch places with me and I’ll take her temperature again,” I said, as I moved to let him take my seat.

  I slid the thermometer under her tongue while he held her still. It was an old mercury thermometer, and I forgot to shake the mercury back down. I pulled it back and shook it. The thermometer flew from my hand and shattered on the floor.

  “Shit!” I yelled.

  Lisa’s eyes slammed open and she sat up, coughing and shaking.

  “Lisa!” Max turned her head in his hands. “Lisa, can you hear me?”

  She jerked a little and said, “Damn, Dad. I’m sick, not deaf!”

  I laughed loudly and got down next to them. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Like shit, thank you. Can you get me out of this tub? I’m freezing.”

  I looked at Max. “It’s a good sign, I think. It means the fever has broken.”

  Max busied himself helping Lisa up and toweling her off, but I could see what looked like hope in his eyes.

  “Jeez, Dad, you’re going to rub my skin off; easy, would ya!”

  Max smiled then muttered, “Oh, she’s definitely getting better. She sounds just like her mother when she gets her ass up in the air.”

  I just grinned and said, “Come on, let’s get her back to the couch.”

  Once we had Lisa settled back on the couch, I signaled Max to follow me into the garage. We needed to secure the house. Max was so caught up with Lisa that he hadn’t been thinking about it. I am the youngest in my family so I usually defer to my older siblings, but I didn’t live through yesterday just to sit by and wait for him to make the call.

  “Max, we only have an hour or so of light left. We need to finish boarding up the windows and doors.”

  He just stared at me for a minute.

  “Max?”

  He shook his head once and nodded.

  “That sounds like a good idea,” he said, finally snapping back to the present.

  Max had been a carpenter his entire life. There was no one I knew who was better with a hammer and nails. In very short order, we had completed the job and set about taking an inventory of the supplies in the house and those we brought with us, in preparation for the night ahead. The light outside was fading and I’d no idea what to expect.

  Would thousands of those freaks attack us as soon as it gets dark, or would they leave us alone entirely? I had no clue.

  With night looming, we sat in the living room to go over our stock. Max and Lisa came to the party with nothing but their clothes and a desire to live. We had plenty of food and enough water to last us through the night, thanks to Sarah and Tim. One tub of water upstairs was full, and there was still some left in the tub downstairs—though we wouldn’t be drinking that. There was no telling what came off of or out of Lisa during her bath.

  I brought two of the M4 rifles and the M9 from the ferry, courtesy of the National Guard. I managed to carry two bags of 30-round magazines, totaling about 600 rounds of .556 for the M4s. I had five 15-round magazines for the M9; seventy-five rounds of 9mm.

  I’d carefully packed five of the grenades in my backpack. I had no experience with them, and frankly, they scared the shit out of me. But Max’s eyes lit up when he saw them.

  “Shit, oh dear, little brother. Where did you get those?” were his exact words.

  We had two flashlights, my tactical 300-lumen that had been in my laptop bag and the small LED on my survival knife. We found a Coleman LED lantern with an extra battery in the garage and a few candles in the kitchen pantry. We laid out everything and split the weapons between us—Max and I that is, Lisa was still out of action. I was exhausted; Max said he was fine, so he took the first watch.

  “Wake me at midnight. No lights and no sound, Bro. We’ve got to act like a black hole here and hope we go unnoticed,” I said, and trundled off to collapse in the next room.

  I thought I would pass out as soon as I hit the bed, but once I was horizontal, my mind went into high gear. A panic attack struck me as I realized that this was for real. I’d been so focused on just making it through the day, my mind had saved up all its emotional baggage until I landed. I rolled over and puked my guts out; I didn’t have time to stifle the urge. It just came. Waves of worry about my wife and kids caught up with me and knocked me sideways. Tears spewed from my eyes as my breath came in gasps. The room was spinning and I thought for sure I was dying. I flopped back on the mattress and grabbed onto the bedding to keep from flying across the room. My heart rate soared as the primal fight or flight coursed through me.

  Then it stopped. Everything slowly ebbed and I felt the panic leave me. Face the fear, I told myself. My wife is strong and the kids are smart. If anyone stands a chance of making it, they do.

  “J,” my wife of twenty-seven years, would be with my son Mark and his wife, Patty. They had all my prepper supplies as well as their own bug-out bags. Mark had his .45 auto and my dad’s old Winchester 1894. I also remembered that Ann, his maternal grandmother, had given him his Pappy’s .357.

  My paranoia about our country’s economy collapsing turned out to be wrong, or at least avoided by this crazy scenario. After the last big crash of the stock market in ’08, I stocked the house with canned goods. I also bought an AR15 and a thousand or so rounds of .223, in addition to my shotgun and 9mm pistol.

  They could hunker down in town then beat feet for the camp—a 4.5-acre piece of land with a double-wide on it near Tygart Lake in West Virginia, about two and half hours north of them. We lived there for several years before I transferred to Charleston.

  My daughter, Auddy, lived in South Carolina, and that was my biggest fear. She was afraid to own a gun; all she had was a damn Taser and some mace I’d bought for her. Her boyfriend was smart and tough and would do what he could, but the not knowing haunted me.

  Somehow, I managed to fall asleep in spite of the rantings of my conscious mind.

  I woke to Max’s whispered insistence. I sat up and tried to make sense of what he was saying.

  “Ryan, wake up! Something is out there, Ryan!”

  I sat up and waved him quiet. Listening for a minute, I could hear the shrieks I’d come to associate with the freaks. Yeah, that name is going to stick, I thought before
my mind flicked back to Max.

  “Are they trying to get in?” I asked him, feeling around for the M9 I left lying next to me on the bed.

  “No, but there seems to be a bunch of them running up and down the street.”

  He was standing by the window, peering out of the cracks he left specifically for that purpose. I cupped my hand over the end of my flashlight and flicked it on and off to check the batteries, then located the M9, holstered it, and got up to stand next to him. We stood there together, looking out through the crack and over the driveway to the street.

  It was a rare clear moonlit night in western Washington, and I could see fairly well. Several of the freaks were jogging down the middle of the road. They stopped and lifted their faces toward the sky, as if they were sniffing the air. Every so often, one would break off from the pack and head off on its own. This was the first time I saw that type of pack mentality. Up until then, I’d only experienced them mano-a-mano. This was new, and new scared me. It meant they were developing traits they didn’t possess last night, or perhaps I just hadn’t seen it. It showed a level of intelligence, this cooperation between them, and that didn’t bode well for us. Their methods had not found us yet, but it was concerning nonetheless.

  “How is Lisa doing?” I asked, almost too low to be heard. “And what time is it?”

  Max looked at his watch. “It’s 1:30, and Lisa seems to be resting much better than earlier. Without the thermometer, though, I can’t tell if she still has a fever.”

  “Well? Does she still feel hot?”

  Max shot back a hurt look. “How the hell am I supposed to tell?”

  We are making too much noise. I raised my hand to try to quiet him. I had it about halfway up when I heard a loud shriek right outside the window, then another at the front of the house. That’s when the banging started. It sounded like they couldn’t tell the difference between the boarded windows and the exterior walls.

  The booming noise grew more frequent, and Max raised his M4. I began waving frantically in the half-dark room at him. Thankfully, he saw me, lowered the rifle, and mouthed “WHAT?” back at me.

  I pointed to the other room and made what I thought was the universal sign for someone sleeping, then pointed again, hoping he understood we needed to go to Lisa. He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. No, dumb shit, I don’t want to take a nap.

  “Go to Lisa,” I whispered and pointed again.

  He acted like he couldn’t read my mind and flipped me off as he headed to the front room. I turned the flashlight on again, keeping my hand over the light, letting just enough spill for me to see my way. When I got to the couch, Max was there feeling Lisa’s forehead.

  I heard panting noises coming from the door a few feet away. As quietly as I could, I crept over to it. We had only put a couple of two-by-fours across the front door in case we needed to use it as an exit. The door was steel, with a deadbolt in addition to the normal door lock. I crouched down and eased up with my back against the wall right next to it. I could still hear the panting outside and wanted to see if it was just one. Probably just a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness… right? I turned to face the door and slowly elevated to the peephole. It reminded me of U-boat movies where the captain raises the periscope to see if the destroyers are still there.

  Steeling myself for whatever I was about to see, I pressed my eye to the lens. What I saw was a freak running full speed toward the door. I almost got my face off the door before he hit. The force of the impact combined with my initial backwards motion launched me onto my ass, taking out a little table and the knick-knacks it held. The crashing wood and breaking glass figurines sounded like a car wreck. Lisa came to with a scream and Max started unloading his M4 at the door.

  By the time I got to my feet, Max had burned through one magazine and was loading another.

  “STOP! HOLD IT!” I blurted.

  I went back to the door and peered through one of the new holes provided by Max. On the porch, a single body lay on its side. I stood up and opened the little portal that surrounded the peephole like a speakeasy password door. My nostrils were immediately assaulted by the smell that I would now forever associate with these… these… freaks!

  I only had to look at the body for a second to verify that it was not getting back up, and then I looked to the street beyond. Shit! Fifteen to twenty of the freaks were running full tilt down the street toward the house. I turned and yelled,

  “Run! Go to the utility room!”

  Max grabbed Lisa’s arm, yanking her to her feet just as I got to them. I grabbed her other arm. You would never have guessed that two overweight fifty-plus-year-old guys could move like we were. We dodged around the obstacles we had set up earlier in the day, making it to the kitchen just as the first of the freaks hit the door. It shook, but held. I slipped a little making the turn toward the stairway that led down to the utility room, landing on my left knee. The one the doctor said would never be right again, even after he replaced half of it with titanium.

  I dropped Lisa’s arm and kept shouting to them, “Go… Go… Go!”

  I turned to the door and brought the M4 up. The door still held, but I didn’t know how long it would. One after the other, the freaks launched their bodies at the door. They were all shrieking.

  Probably calling all the freaks in Seattle to the buffet, I thought, as I waited to see if they’d get through. Each time one hit the door, I winced. They kept it up for a good while. I don’t know how long I sat there kneeling with the M4 pointed at the door. I just know that my knee was killing me. I slid to the floor and belly-crawled to the stairway. I could barely make out Max at the doorway of the utility room in the basement.

  I set the last trap as I heard the frame of the front door crack. I didn’t know if it would continue to hold, but I wasn’t sticking around to find out. I turned over onto my ass and bumped down the stairs like a two-year-old looking for a good time. When I got to the bottom, Max grabbed my hand, pulled me into the room, and slammed the door shut.

  “Did they get in?” Max asked, hammering two-by-fours over each corner of the door and frame. He told me earlier that it gave more surface strength to the door than simply nailing them across the frame.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, rubbing my knee and making a pouty face.

  “Why in hell’s name did you shoot the hell out of the door?” I asked in a reasonable tone, which probably came out sounding more like, “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING, YOU IDIOT?”

  Max didn’t miss a lick. “Oh, I dunno. Maybe because I just saw my little brother go flying backward and I thought it might be a good idea to stop whatever was trying to break in and eat his ungrateful, useless ass.”

  “Hmm…” I replied thoughtfully. “Well, you know that every one of those things within miles is probably headed for this house now, looking for an easy meal.”

  Max briefly paused his hammering and said, “I guess I should have just let them eat you then.”

  He finished nailing up the boards that we stored down there for this very purpose. Earlier, we had set up the utility room as our fallback position. All our weapons and ammunition, some water, and some food were down here. He’d, however, left the five grenades upstairs, set up with trip wires around the house as a surprise for our guests. Thankfully, we hadn’t tripped them dragging Lisa across the living room, which could have happened easily since she wasn’t in on the plan.

  The house shook and dust fell on us from the ceiling. “One down,” Max said, and lifted four fingers, his thumb crossing his palm. The second grenade exploded, sending another massive quake through the house. Max folded over a finger. Again, the house joggled; again Max put down a finger. I just covered my head and hoped the ceiling stayed in place.

  “Jeez Max, get down,” I shouted…

  Max just smiled and looked up. A thump that felt like a blow to the gut rattled the room. Max bent down and covered his head, which was what I told him to do, but it did not instill a lot of confidence in
my expectations. I grabbed Lisa and covered her as best I could. The walls literally bowed inward, my ears felt the compression, and the world went dark.

  *****

  Max shook his head and wondered how long he’d been out. He found Ryan’s tactical flashlight and turned it on to check on Ryan and Lisa. They both seemed to be unconscious, but okay otherwise—no bloody ears, noses, or eyes.

  He got up and surveyed the damage. The room itself was still structurally sound. Stuff had fallen off the shelves and the drop-down ceiling tiles were lying about, making the room seem in disarray. Not bad. His booby traps had all gone off without completely destroying their HQ.

  It was just like his days in the army, although he’d never actually been in combat. All they had ever done was train, sit around, and then train some more. He was glad to see that the training had stuck thirty-five years later. He looked at the time, 5:20 a.m.—still a few minutes before the sun would come up.

  He got up and went to the door. He put his ear to it to see if he could hear anything moving in the basement. His hearing wasn’t great before the grenades went off, and now there was a persistent high-pitched ringing, but he concentrated on trying to locate any movement outside the utility room.

  After a few minutes, he decided to do some recon. He pulled the boards from the doorframe with the claw hammer as quietly as possible. He started to open the door, and then stopped. He checked his rifle and made sure there was a fresh magazine in place with a round in the chamber. He cautiously opened the door and stepped out, closing it behind him.

  *****

  I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but as I came to, my ears were ringing and I was covered in debris. I lay there for a moment to get my wits about me. I felt someone moving under me and remembered trying to cover Lisa. I rolled to the side a little.