Separated: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (One Family's Survival Book 1) Read online

  “OK,” Jenny said. “Get my fleece, too. I’m freezing.”

  Cole touched her hand, this time to feel her temperature and not focused only on whether she could move it or not. T

  he skin was cold and clammy. He pulled up another mental checklist and took her pulse – rapid and thin. Shock.

  “Let’s get you warmed up,” he said.

  He couldn’t get her pullover on her until after he got her bandaged. The best he was able to do was lay out one of the emergency blankets, put his pullover onto it, and roll her onto that. He also didn’t want to elevate her legs with the deep abdominal wounds.

  With the darkness and him needing to keep moving her hands away from her sides, where she kept trying to hug herself to alleviate the pain, it took a lot longer than he’d hoped to finally get her wrapped up and into her own pullover.

  “Here’s the best I can do for you,” Cole said, tearing open a packet of ibuprofen tablets for her and giving her some water to wash it down.

  He found a comfortable spot against a tree where he could lean back, and Jenny could recline against him. This put some of his body heat between her and the ground so she could cover up with the blanket and stay warm.

  “We’re probably out here until dawn, aren’t we?” Jenny asked. Cole was relieved to hear that her voice was starting to sound normal, if still pained.

  “I wouldn’t want to move you around in the dark like this.”

  “I could really use some rest before I try to walk the rest of the way up the hill.”

  “Get some sleep,” Cole said.

  He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after midnight. He made sure to put the two canisters of bear spray within easy reach.

  He wondered if they could have had the canisters more accessible for quick deployment at night, but they required two hands to deploy properly, and that wasn’t possible while also carrying a long arm, without dropping it or trying to awkwardly tuck the gun under an arm or something.

  He pondered whether it was better to hold the bear spray at night and sling the guns if they ever went out after dark again, and fell asleep before he ever figured it out.

  * **

  He slept restlessly, with chill of the night constantly waking him up, or stiff limbs from leaning against a tree, or Jenny moving about.

  Almost every hour he found himself looking at his watch. He’d check Jenny’s breathing and pulse.

  About half the time, he’d wake her up and make her talk to him so he could be sure that she hadn’t been concussed without any external signs of injury.

  When it was light enough for him to see more than a dozen feet, he slid out from under Jenny and walked a short distance away to relieve himself.

  “Stay there for a minute,” he heard Jenny say as he was finishing up, presumably to take care of the same need herself..

  Over a quick breakfast of protein bars, dried fruit, and water, Cole gave Jenny another check.

  She had bled through the bandages in her sleep, but he decided to wait until they were at the cabin to try and pull them off and change them.

  “That was a pretty stupid idea to go out last night, wasn’t it?” Cole asked, as the arrival of honest daylight showed him how pale Jenny was, how much blood there was in her clothes, and the litter of bandage dressings around them.

  One of them must have winged the mountain lion to get it to flee like it did. Cole didn’t want to think of what would have happened if he hadn’t.

  Was there any way he would have gotten a clear second shot with the Mossberg if the mountain lion had actually gotten onto Jenny. He was sure it was mostly luck that he still had a sister.

  “It wasn’t one of your best,” Jenny said. “But don’t beat yourself up. Neither of us could have predicted the cat. I think we just startled her a bit, may have accidentally gotten her feeling cornered here in the draw.”

  She pointed up the steep cut in the hillside, which narrowed significantly not far from where they were sitting. The cleanest way out was downhill, not up.

  “I still should have listened to you when you told me it was a bad idea,” Cole said.

  “It was with good intent, and we got some good information out of it.”

  “Expensive information,” Cole said.

  “I’ll make sure you pay me back. Someday. For now, let’s get going. I could really go for some honest sleep on a real bed.”

  Chapter 7

  “Hey, Bill, Sally,” Steve Patten said from the doorway of his spare room, tapping lightly on the jamb.

  “Yeah,” Bill said, shaking cobwebs from his mind.

  It had taken him a long time to calm down enough to catch a little bit of rest, but once he’d gone down, he went down deep.

  “Three National Guard trucks rolled through a bit ago but didn’t stop here. The guy guarding us has just started nodding off. If there’s going to be a shift change, it’ll probably be on an hour, so it looks like now is your best chance to scoot, in case two is when they’re swapping.”

  Bill looked at his watch. It was 1:38.

  “Good call,” he said, reaching for his boots in the darkness.

  A couple minutes later, he and Sally stumbled out into the candle-lit kitchen. There were four wrapped sandwiches on the table, along with a pair of travel mugs and the smell of fresh brewed coffee in the air.

  “I’ll want the mugs back eventually,” Patten said.

  “We’ll even wash them for you,” Sally said. “Thank you so much. You’re a real life-saver.”

  “Family first, I’m sorry those dipshits out there don’t recognize that,” Patten said.

  With a last couple of handshakes, Bill and Sally crept out the back door. He’d given them directions to a path that ran along the lake, at least down a mile or so to a good fishing spot.

  “You’re going to have to run wide of the marina – that’s also guarded, and be careful getting through the campground. Don’t know much beyond that, but cleaving to the lake as much as you can will keep you off the road. Just be careful. The shoreline’s iffy in some spots.”

  He gave them a couple of broom handles to use as walking poles, to probe the ground in front of them as they walked in the darkness.

  A couple sandwiches, a cup of coffee, and an old broom handle each. Steve Patten didn’t offer anything more, Bill and Sally didn’t ask.

  The full extent of what had happened, how much disruption there was and how widespread, was still completely unknown.

  Bill understood that Patten had to look after himself. Cold cuts would only last so long without refrigeration, so that was an easy thing to give up to strangers.

  Anything more that Patten gave up was coming out of a finite stock, and he didn’t know how long he’d need to make that last.

  More valuable, by far, than the items Patten had given up was the time and shelter.

  As Bill and Sally stepped off into the darkness, they still had their guns. They were back on the trail to get to their children and their own cabin, where they had the resources to ride things out for a good while.

  The first mile down the lakeside trial was not bad. Even in the dark, under the full moon, by the time their eyes adapted Bill and Sally were able to make out the lighter beaten earth among the darker brush flanking it.

  The fishing hole was also easy for them to make out. It was a larger, flatish area along the lake that was cleared out, and there were a few nice hunks of log set out as seats around a little ring of stones. They decided to take a short sit-down there and have a sandwich together.

  The still waters of the lake were a black expanse that spread out before them. Lake Koocanusa was a reservoir, less than a half-mile wide in most places, but more than ninety miles long.

  Rexford was about the middle of the lake. There was a single bridge over it, about 8 miles south.

  Beyond the lake, the far shore was invisible in the darkness. Taking out their binoculars, Bill and Sally couldn’t see any light along the far shore at all.r />
  “What do you say, three hours to the bridge if we stick to the shoreline?” Sally asked, when she finished eating.

  Bill looked at his watch again and did a quick calculation.

  Sunrise would be about 6:30, usable twilight at least an hour before that.

  “Something like that. Let’s roll, if we want to get across the lake before dawn.”

  Most of their route wasn’t bad. They were never far from Highway 37, which ran the length of the east shore from Rexford south.

  Most of the shoreline was reasonably clear, but the land sloped severely down to the water. There were a couple of spots where their only option was to get up onto the road for a while.

  Once, they heard a vehicle driving down the road and they ducked themselves under cover.

  After it passed, slowly and driving with its headlights off, Bill said, “Diesel, not much bigger than a pickup. Didn’t sound like a military vehicle.”

  “Does the military have a lot of vehicles that will still be running?”

  “A lot of the Reserve and National Guard units up here still have really old vehicles, the ones that don’t have EFI or other computer systems that could get burnt out by an EMP. They’ll be the first ones back on the road in large numbers.”

  “How soon?” Sally said.

  “I wish I knew, I just know that the faster we get across the lake, the better,” Bill said. “Rexford had just a sworn deputy and two volunteers to clamp it down, and they were only armed with a pistol and a couple rifles. It was only the real big imbalance between them and the folks in town not willing to give up their guns that kept that place free enough for us to get through it with what we’ve got.”

  He patted his pistol, which he was holstering openly again.

  “Put more people on the ground, with more serious firepower, body armor, maybe even some armored vehicles and heavy weapons, and thing will be a lot different. We’ll do much better on the west side of the lake in our cabin than anybody in a city or town over on this side is.”

  Sally nodded, and finished her coffee. She’d heard Bill tell her about what he’d seen overseas. He didn’t need to elaborate much.

  “Let’s get it going, then,” she said.

  Two hours later, they saw light up ahead: pairs of headlights.

  “Damn it!” Bill cursed, reaching into his ruck for his binoculars.

  The glow was coming from the bridge over the lake. At the far end of the bridge and in the middle there were a couple of Army deuces using their headlights to help some troops set up trailer-mounted generators with tall light masts rising above them.

  “We burned way too much time sitting tight in Rexford.”

  “No,” Sally said, taking her own binoculars from her eyes. “They’ve been set up for a few hours at least. Look again at all those sandbags.”

  Bill took another look. Sure enough, there were three sandbagged emplacements already set up on the bridge.

  At the far landing, he could barely make out another emplacement along the shore.

  Assuming they had to fill the bags on site, that did represent a good amount of work.

  “Would we never have crossed in daylight anyway,” Sally asked.

  “Right,” Bill had to admit. If they had gotten to the bridge earlier, he would have insisted they wait until dark to brave the open and exposed crossing over the lake.

  “So…situation,” Sally said.

  “Let’s assume this crossing is a no – they’ll just disarm us and sweep us into some sort of camp or other confinement area. They will probably send somebody for the kids if we tell them how to get to the cabin.”

  “We’d be together, but still unarmed and in a camp. Not desirable.”

  “Correct,” Bill said. “At the cabin together is our best possible situation.”

  “Next nearest crossings are the Libby Dam, what, 40 to 50 miles south, or the Canadian bridge 40 miles or so north.”

  “Libby Dam is certainly more heavily guarded than this this bridge. No go there. Whatever has hit us here didn’t stop abruptly at the Canadian border, so we can assume a similar situation up there. More polite martial law than down here, but still martial law,” Bill said.

  “And two border crossings if we try to get around the river to the north. No idea what might happen if we’re caught trying to cross the border,” Sally said.

  “And if we are interned north of the border let’s assume the kids will never get picked up. For good or for ill.”

  “Long term separation from them is the worst possible situation,” Sally said.

  “OK. So surrendering and having the kids brought to us is the middle path. Not desirable, but workable.”

  Sally rocked her head back and forth as she weighed things out. “Let’s be honest, we know the government has a real bad record about keeping track of kids and parents when they get separated, and there’s a lot more room for mistakes and things falling between the cracks right now than there usually is. I don’t trust Cole and Jen in their custody unless they are physically right beside us the entire time.”

  Bill scrunched up his face and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got to find some way across this lake.” The thought of trying to swim for it, day or night, did not appeal to him at all.

  Chapter 8

  Instead of trekking cross-country back up to the cabin, Cole and Jenny took the road.

  With the switchbacks to get up the hillside, it was easily four times longer, but with her wounds from the mountain lion, she didn’t feel she was in any state to try going up the steep draw, which was damp and slick with the morning dew.

  At the busiest of times, the road got almost no traffic. It was nothing uncommon for them to see only a handful of vehicles per day on it.

  With presumably most motor vehicles disabled, they did not expect to see any trucks, but still kept their eyes out for foot traffic – which would be a lot quieter – as well as wild animals.

  It was not uncommon for them to see bears and big cats around the cabin, and their encounter the night before had them jumpy at any sound at all coming from the brush.

  When they got close enough to see the cabin, their hearts fell when they saw the truck was not there.

  Neither of them truly expected to see it, but there was still some odd little hope in them that somehow their parents had managed to avoid the event or somehow get the truck running and get back across the lake.

  They still made a very cautious approach to the cabin, just in case their parents or somebody else had gotten in while they were gone. The two shots they’d fired off the night before made them nervous.

  It advertised their presence, where they would have preferred to be as low key as possible until their parents got back.

  “We need to set up tells, and some sort of alarms if we can,” Jenny said as they started up the driveway.

  She was pale and moving very slowly. Even with taking most of Cole’s water after they’d refilled their canteens at the creek, she was still terribly thirsty and had just stopped sweating.

  After having been through a severe case of the chills from shock the night before, the unseasonably warm day was starting to get to her, even so close to dawn.

  “We need to get you properly cleaned up and your dressings changed first.”

  “Right,” she said, nodding her head and continuing to put one foot in front of the other. At first, she shook off the steadying hand that Cole offered her, but after her first good stumble she grabbed his arm and leaned into him while they walked.

  The cabin was still locked, and a quick look at the front, at least, showed no broken windows or other obvious signs that anybody had gotten in that way.

  Cole considered going around back to be sure, but Jenny really needed to lay down and get some water into her.

  Once she was hydrating, Cole heated up some water on the propane cook stove, then gave Jenny some privacy to clean up while he cracked into the wilderness medicine book.

  Becaus
e of the risk of very bad infection from trapping dirt inside the wound, Cole was glad he hadn’t used the Quikclot on it right away, but the fact that at least one of the slashes still hadn’t stopped bleeding him was troublesome.

  The book did have instructions on how to suture a wound, but he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to try something like that.

  Even after Jenny came out of the bedroom holding a gauze pad over her wounds, blood already showing through it, he consigned that to his last resort option.

  She laid back on the sofa while Cole applied more pressure to the wounds, and looked over the instructions for treating deep lacerations.

  In the end, she wasn’t keen on getting stitched up by an amateur either, but both recognized it might come to that.

  Since the wounds had been washed twice, with a treatment of antibiotic salve both times, they decided to take a risk on the Quikclot.

  Cole boiled some water and let it cool until it was barely tolerable to touch. He gloved up again, and tried his best to be gentle while he thoroughly washed the gashes once more.

  This time, he did not put any antibiotic salve directly on the wounds, but did lay a light layer on the skin immediately around them.

  Once he got the Quikclot bandages on, he covered them over with another layer of fresh gauze, then folded a pillow case over all of that, and bound the whole package up tight.

  “Let me check your temp, JJ,” he told her, digging a thermometer out of the first aid kit and handing it to her while he started cleaning up.

  She was running a slight fever, but at least the wounds hadn’t shown any immediate signs of infection – no foul or off smells, no unusual discharge, and no redness or heat radiating out from the cuts.

  “Maybe you’re still cooling down from the walk up,” he said, getting her a fresh glass of water.

  His next task, once he saw his sister eating and drinking, was to start figuring out how to set up something around the cabin to let them know if anybody was coming onto the property.

  They owned about twenty acres of hillside, but only the small patch immediately around the cabin was cleared. The rest of the property, and most of the land around it, was forested.