Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) Read online

  Push Back

  Disruption - Book 2

  A Thriller By

  R. E. McDermott

  Copyright © 2016 by R.E. McDermott

  Push Back is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  For more information about the author, please visit:

  www.remcdermott.com

  Contents

  Push Back

  Dedication

  Author's Notes

  Thanks and an Invitation

  More Books by R.E. McDermott

  To my readers

  You make it worth the effort

  Prologue

  The Story Thus Far

  The Event

  1 April 2020

  When a massive solar storm takes down the power grid, Captain Jordan Hughes opts to take his ship Pecos Trader and its precious cargo home to Texas despite formidable odds. Sailing from Wilmington, North Carolina, with a partial crew supplemented by a group of ex-Coast Guardsmen, Hughes eludes both corrupt government forces and Cuban gunboats to get his ship and crew safely home.

  But as Hughes sails south, civilization crumbles. The President, head of an ill-prepared government with insufficient resources to sustain the population, makes a self-serving decision to keep scarce resources for ‘government use,’ and to seize private stocks of food, water, and fuel. Assisted by a corrupt Secretary of Homeland Security, POTUS squashes political opposition and arrests his most vocal opponent, Simon Tremble, the Speaker of the House.

  In Wilmington, civil order collapses and gangs fill the power vacuum to terrorize a desperate and vulnerable population. But the ascendancy of the gangs is not unchallenged; a coalition of ex-Coast Guardsmen and the remnants of a National Guard unit seize the Wilmington Container Terminal and its massive store of cargo and establish Fort Box. As frictions between the two groups grow, the gang leader orders an attack on the home of Levi Jenkins, an ex-Pecos Trader crewman allied with Fort Box. The gang is narrowly defeated and withdraws to lick its wounds as a (very) temporary and uneasy peace ensues.

  Meanwhile, Hughes reaches home in Texas to find chaos there as well. Local government has collapsed, and the area is ruled by escaped convicts masquerading as policemen. Vastly outnumbered, he avoids contact until a family rescue mission explodes into a running gun battle that leaves a dozen convicts dead. The stage is set for continuing struggle.

  As events unfold in North Carolina and Texas, Congressman Tremble escapes from FEMA headquarters in Virginia, determined to get home to North Carolina and expose the President’s perfidy. Tremble and his son are assisted in their escape by a chance meeting with Bill Wiggins and Shyla ‘Tex’ Texeira, two former Pecos Trader crewmen making their way home on the Appalachian Trail.

  Shaken by Tremble’s escape, the President launches an all-out manhunt for the escaped congressman and his son, as elsewhere FEMA attempts to crush rising resistance to governmental excesses and abuse.

  The Trembles continue to avoid capture, hiding in the Virginia mountains while Wiggins and Tex make their way north towards home. The red herring in the mix is George Anderson, Simon Tremble’s former FEMA guard, who Tremble has duped into becoming a diversion.

  The chase is on.

  Chapter One

  Appalachian Trail

  Mile 1199.7 Southbound

  Just north of US 50/17

  Day 20, 6:15 a.m.

  Briers ripped George Anderson’s clothes, and small branches lashed his face as he crashed downhill, leaving a trail through the dense undergrowth a blind man could follow. The dogs’ excited baying in the distance left no doubt they were closing, and the outcome of the chase was a foregone conclusion unless he could think of something, and fast.

  The brush thinned abruptly, and his right foot met thin air, plunging him on hands and knees into a small fast-moving stream. He cursed as his knees smashed into the hard slate of the creek bed and he barely managed to avoid sprawling face-first in the water. Then hope rose anew—would water confuse the dogs? He ignored aching knees and bolted downstream through calf-deep water in a limping run. He slipped and slid on the slick bottom, barely managing to stay upright, his pulse pounding and his breath coming in loud, ragged gasps.

  He moved faster in the creek and even imagined the barking was fading, but minutes later a change in the timbre and volume of the baying told him the dogs had reached the stream. He held his breath to quiet his breathing in the desperate hope he’d hear some sign the water had defeated the dogs. The triumphant baying of the lead hound dashed that hope—the chase was on again.

  Anderson pushed even harder, oblivious to the treacherous footing as he splashed downstream. He had even increased his lead a bit, when his left foot plunged into a shallow depression in the creek bed. He went down face-first, striking his head on a large rock.

  He struggled to a sitting position, stunned, his vision obscured. Water swirled around him, tugging insistently, and when he wiped his eyes, his hand came away bloody. He bent his face to the creek and shoveled water over his head with his cupped hands until his vision cleared. The baying of the hounds grew louder. His left knee throbbed. Time for plan B, whatever the hell that was.

  He’d read somewhere dogs followed scent through the air, and the failure of the stream to confuse them supported that theory. Could he use that?

  He limped to the stream’s edge to strip off his ragged backpack and shirt, setting them both on the bank to peel off his sweat-soaked tee shirt. The sodden fabric clung to him, the sour odor of stale sweat intense as he tugged it over his head. He grimaced as he held the tee in his teeth and rummaged in the backpack for his water jug, a gallon Clorox bottle. He dumped the water and recapped the bottle, then wrapped the stinking tee shirt tightly around it, securing it with a length of twine from his pocket. Satisfied, he tossed the reeking float in the middle of the creek and watched it zip downstream faster than any human—or leashed tracking dog—was ever likely to move. “Please don’t hang up anywhere,” Anderson murmured.

  “Okay, Anderson, stay calm,” he told himself as he slipped into his outer shirt without bothering to button it. “There’s plenty of time, so don’t screw this up.” The baying was closer.

  He fumbled in the pack again for an old plastic garbage bag then transferred the meager contents of the pack to the bag before tossing the empty backpack into the stream near the bank. It tumbled downstream, half-submerged in the rushing water, to fetch up on a tree limb dangling into the edge of the creek. Anderson nodded—it looked natural, not staged—but his self-congratulations were short-lived as something ran into his eyes and he looked down at a blood-soaked shirt front and blood spots dotting the rocks around him. Still bleeding!

  The dogs were close now, their yelps increasingly excited and mixed with human shouts. Panic rising, he tore his shirttail into a makeshift bandage—then stopped. Stay cool, Anderson, stay cool—lemonade from lemons.

  He limped into the creek and bent at the waist, his hand cupped to his head wound to collect the blood. When he had enough, he slung the collected blood downstream, dotting the rocks along the creek’s edge be
fore he tied the makeshift bandage around his head, praying it would staunch the blood flow long enough.

  Heart pounding, he dunked bloody hands in the creek, then waded out, splashing the bank thoroughly as he came, both to wash away the blood drops and hide his wet footprints as he exited. On the bank, he pulled one last tool from his ‘garbage bag of tricks,’ his homemade water decontamination system, a half-liter plastic water bottle containing an inch of chlorine bleach. He slipped the bottle in his hip pocket, grabbed the garbage bag and moved away from the bank carefully, fighting an urge to crash through the brush.

  Panic barely contained, he entered the thick brush carefully, gently bending tall grass and shrubs aside and stopping to disentangle himself from briers and thorns rather than bulling through, then making the extra effort of rearranging the foliage behind him as he backed into the brush. Every few feet he sprinkled bleach to mask his scent, careful not to leave enough for the humans to smell, but hopefully enough to irritate sensitive canine noses and divert the dogs to the far more interesting scent trail planted downstream. Thirty feet into the brush, he could clearly hear voices with the dogs. He eased to the ground.

  He’d barely quieted his breathing when his pursuers arrived, two of the three breathing so hard noise from his own breathing was no longer a concern. The third man, probably the dog handler, wasn’t winded at all. Anderson recognized two voices—Cooney and Maloney—it would be those assholes. The dogs’ baying changed to confused and plaintive yelps.

  “What the hell’s wrong? Why are they running around in circles and yelping?” Cooney asked.

  “He stopped here,” the tracker said. “There must be a lot of scent and it’ll take ’em a minute to process it before they pick up the trail. He might have—”

  “Pick up the trail?” Maloney scoffed. ‘The ‘trail’ is about twenty feet wide and has water flowing through it. Look! What’s that? Get those mutts over there!”

  Anderson heard splashing.

  “He’s tiring and shedding gear. And look, there’s blood. He must be hurt,” Cooney said. “We got him now! Let’s get downstream.”

  Anderson heard Maloney laugh. “No hurry. I’ll radio ahead to Renfro and Herndon and tell ’em to move up US 50 from the trail crossing to this hollow. The road’s straight a mile in either direction from the bridge where this creek passes under the road. If they’re on the bridge, they’ll see him coming down the creek. Even if he gets out of the creek before the bridge, they’ll spot him crossing the highway. We’ll herd Tremble right to them.”

  “One thing bothers me, though,” Cooney said. “If this is Tremble, where’s his kid?”

  “Who cares? That’s a problem for our more ‘specialized’ co-workers back at Mount Weather. Our job is just to bring him in.” Maloney spoke to the dog handler. “Get those mutts moving. If we keep him looking over his shoulder, he’ll pay less attention to where he’s going.”

  Their voices faded downstream. Son of a bitch! That bastard Tremble managed to use him as a diversion after all. He and the kid were laying up somewhere north, hoping Anderson would draw off pursuit—and he was. But why were the dogs following HIS scent? Surely they’d been given something of Tremble’s to track?

  Then it hit him. As Tremble’s guard, he was constantly in and out of their apartment. His scent must be all over that place. And Simon Tremble escaped in Anderson’s stolen uniform and his patrol vehicle, so depending on what FEMA gave the tracker, Anderson’s scent was well mixed with Tremble’s. The dogs were just following the best trail they found. Unfortunately that was his.

  He briefly considered giving up, then dismissed the idea. He allowed Tremble to escape not once but twice and ‘aided and abetted’ the last time, even if it had been at gunpoint. That meant, at best, relocation to some squalid ‘’fugee’ camp, but more likely a bullet in the head and a shallow grave.

  The good news was this search wasn’t about him. They probably thought Tremble left him in the woods somewhere with a bullet between the eyes. So if he DID get away, he was home free—assuming he kept his mouth shut and maintained a low profile.

  Anderson considered his next move. The Appalachian Trail crossing at US 50/17 was now unguarded, at least for the moment, and he was sure his stinky decoy would sail under the highway long before Renfro and Herndon made it to the bridge. When his pursuers reunited at the bridge, they’d likely all conclude he’d just been faster than they figured, and start downstream after him.

  He rummaged in his garbage bag for the dog-eared copy of The AT Guide he’d found at Bear’s Den and flipped pages. The trail followed the ridgetop while the stream diverged at almost a right angle. He smiled as he traced the blue line to the Shenandoah River at Berry’s Ferry—five miles west as the crow flew, but four or five times that via the stream’s twisting route through rugged terrain. With luck a waterfall or two along the way might slow them down; it would be the better part of a day before they reached the Shenandoah, wondering where the hell he was. He’d bought precious time, now to spend it wisely.

  They’d come back to the AT to pick up his trail—there was no help for that. But the roads were undoubtedly thick with FEMA agents, so the AT was still his only real option. He studied the trail guide. They’d watch trail crossings for sure. The pair Maloney so obligingly pulled off the nearest crossing was the primary containment, but Anderson had no doubt there was a second team where I-66 and Virginia 55 paralleled each other to the south at Manassas Gap. Would they set the net wider? Unlikely, for a fugitive on foot. If he could get south of I-66 undetected while they were looking the other way, he had a chance. He prayed the team at I-66 was listening to the radio traffic from the ‘chase’ now underway and had their guard down.

  Another thought occurred to him. The average hiker under pack made twenty miles a day or less in this terrain. But the average hiker didn’t have the motivation of a large group of heavily armed people trying to kill him. What if he made thirty or even thirty-five miles today, then rose at first light tomorrow to duplicate the effort? If he could just slip past I-66, chances were they would think he was hiding and focus the search—and the chopper coverage—where he’d BEEN instead of where he was.

  Anderson fastened a better head bandage to avoid a blood trail, stuffed his meager belongings back into the garbage bag, and eased out of the brush, careful to leave no trail. He moved into the creek and glanced regretfully downstream—he had to leave the backpack undisturbed, as much as he wanted to reclaim it. Let them keep guessing as to when and how he eluded them.

  He limped upstream in the creek, careful of his footing this time, to the point they’d all entered the water. The walk back uphill was easier in some regards, since his bull-like passage and that of his pursuers had blazed a trail. It was much more difficult in other ways, and his left knee throbbed as he walked uphill backward to avoid leaving a tell-tale footprint in the wrong direction.

  At the point he’d originally left the AT, he diluted the remaining bleach with the contents of one of his smaller half-liter water bottles. The mixture wasn’t strong, but there was more of it, and it would still be overpowering to the dogs’ sensitive noses. He sprinkled the mixture behind him as he started south toward the US 50/17 crossing at a limping run, cursing the day he’d met Simon Tremble.

  1 Mile off the Appalachian Trail

  Near Virginia-West Virginia Border

  Day 24, 8:25 a.m.

  Congressman Simon Tremble (NC), Speaker of the House of Representatives, looked down at his filthy stolen FEMA uniform and grubby hands and wished not for the first time they had managed to steal some soap during their escape. He sighed. Beggars can’t be choosers, and he’d managed to get Keith to at least relative safety. Despite the circumstances, he smiled as he watched his eighteen-year-old move through the woods ahead of him, without the crutch now, but still with a noticeable limp.

  “We got one!” cried Keith as he hurried forward in a limping run.

  Tremble stifled a rebuke. They we
re in a densely wooded hollow and hadn’t heard a chopper in days. He’d allow the boy what simple pleasures remained in this upside-down world, at least here in the deep woods. It would get a lot tougher when they left their sanctuary.

  He followed carefully, head on a swivel and fully ‘situationally aware,’ employing all the skills learned as a US Army Ranger. He arrived at the snare to find Keith was already skinning the rabbit. His son grinned.

  “That’s two. We’ll eat our fill today.”

  Tremble nodded. “More than we need. If there’s anything in the last two snares, we’ll smoke the meat. We won’t have time to trap every day when we head south, not if we want to make any progress.”

  “When ARE we going? I’m sick of hiding.”

  “When you’re ready, which isn’t now. You’ve only been off the crutch two days, and it’s not that tough to get around in this hollow, but it’s a steep climb almost a mile just to get back up to the main trail.”

  “But, Dad, that asshole Gleason is lying to everyone and murdering people to cover it up and we’re the only ones with proof. We HAVE to do something—”

  “And it’s BECAUSE we’re the only ones with proof we have the responsibility to be cautious; if WE fail, there’s no one else. We’ll head south when we can, but that ankle’s not near healed. We’ve got food, water, and shelter here and, most importantly, total invisibility. If they spot us when we start moving, we’ll have to run for it, and you know what happened last time. If Wiggins and Tex hadn’t come along, we’d both be dead. Have you forgotten that, or do you honestly feel you’re up to running for it?”

  Keith sighed and shook his head.

  His father continued. “We have to give ourselves the best shot at success, and that’s not starting across rugged terrain with you barely able to walk. Besides, we have to consider supplies.”