Black Autumn Travelers Page 7

  Sage recalled his dad droning on about survival butchery while he taught Sage how to slaughter rabbits. The truth about all animals, except for carefully fattened cows and pigs, was that they were naturally lean, with very little fat and scant calories. Wild animals, and even cage-raised rabbits, rarely grew much fat. Their bodies didn’t contain as many calories as one would think. Without simple sugars like roots, berries and bread, Sage would slowly starve to death, even if he stuffed his face full of deer and rabbit. The calories in wild animals weren’t sufficient to sustain human life for long. At least that’s what his dad had said.

  While Sage might succeed in identifying some wilderness plants, and maybe catch fish, rabbits and kill the occasional deer, he knew the process of surviving in the mountains would be a slide into nutritional suicide. Once winter closed in, hypothermia and illness would also raise their ugly heads.

  Sage decided to stay put until the press of humanity slackened. He might be making the biggest mistake of his life, but there was nobody else to consult. He would have to trust what little knowledge and instinct he had learned.

  He spent almost two days moving his gear from the Taurus to a hide-out. Taking the old man’s advice about OPSEC, Sage found a shallow cave that was a quarter of a mile from the dead carcass of his car. The distance forced him to make a lot of trips back and forth, but that was better than staying too near the Taurus. The car would be a dead giveaway that Sage was close. He even used a different route each time he carried a load so he wouldn’t cut an obvious trail for anyone tracking him.

  As the sun set, Sage plopped down on a rock above his hide, totally exhausted. He took inventory of the situation. He had chosen to make his home in the nook of a rocky outcropping on a little ridge—a volcanic protuberance overlooking a pond a quarter-mile below. The pond filled from a pipe poking out of the hillside. It would provide water close to his hide-out, but not too close. Any source of water would draw people. The rocks made it possible to stay off the ridge, where his silhouette would stand out, but still maintain a view for miles around. Luckily, Grandpa Bob had given him a camouflage tarp, and Sage used it to conceal his stack of gear.

  OPSEC, Sage reminded himself. Operational Security. In other words, stay hidden.

  The nook didn’t provide much overhead cover from weather, but it would be a good backstop for a fire. Once while backpacking, he and his dad were stranded in a rainstorm. After the storm passed, they were wet and cold, so they built a fire against a big boulder. The reflected heat dried them out and Sage hoped for the same here.

  Using his buckets of food as support columns, Sage suspended another big tarp overhead, making a small room extending out from the shallow cave. He used up almost all the paracord Grandpa Bob had given him in the process. The big tarp was brown and didn’t match the color of the lava rock, so Sage did his best to face the camo tarp toward the road and the brown tarp away from the road.

  He walked downhill to check it out. From the pond below, he scanned for his hideout. For a moment, he couldn’t even find it. Then he picked out one of the straight lines made by the tautly-stretched tarp. He’d have to work on his camouflage job. Somebody could still find him if they knew where to look.

  On his way back to the hide, he gathered as much dead sagebrush as he could carry. Firewood would be a problem here. The barren hillside was dotted with dead sage and bitterbrush, and it would burn fast. After a short while, he would denude the entire area. He would have to stretch the Coleman propane as long as possible.

  When he returned to his hide, Sage strategically placed the dead sagebrush to improve his camo. He stepped back and realized it would take him twenty armloads of sagebrush to do a half-decent job.

  With his energy running out and the sun dipping behind the flat plain to the west, he couldn’t make himself work anymore. He had already worked harder than any day before in his life. He sat down on a rock and stared out at the bleak landscape—miles and miles of tilled ground, sagebrush, and dirt roads. The magnitude of his isolation dawned on him. He would not be going home for many months. He would have to live here alone. He would have to scratch his survival, somehow, from this raw ground. He couldn’t see how that would even be possible.

  Would this be his life now working his ass off from dawn to dusk just to survive? This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was just a kid. He should have been hanging out with high school friends or paddling around in his mom’s swimming pool. Why had his dad sent him to fucking Washington? All he had done was smoke a little weed. Who hadn’t? He wasn’t a bad kid.

  His anger pushed tears and he sobbed loudly, sitting alone in his desolate hiding place. The injustice of his predicament and exhaustion overwhelmed him. He focused all his indignation on the easiest target: his father.

  Why did his dad have to be such a dick? Why did he make him work all the time on the farm and follow his stupid rules? Did he really think his kids needed to be rich pricks like him? What a douchebag, to think that his kids would even want his life—working all the time just to keep a big house, nice cars, and to make people like him. Couldn’t he see? His kids just wanted to enjoy their lives. They didn’t even want all that money.

  What did his dad hope to accomplish by sending him away? He might even die out here, all because his dad was a fucking control freak. Why did his dad have to treat him like a bad kid and fucking maroon him in the middle of nowhere, probably to die of starvation at seventeen years old. He wasn’t supposed to have to fight for his survival. He was supposed to be enjoying proms and basketball and summer flings.

  Sage’s rage boiled over and he started kicking his stacks of supplies. The more he kicked, the more his anger accelerated. With surprising speed, he flew into a tantrum, knocking down the tarps and booting his supplies across the ground, sending them rolling down the hillside.

  When he finally ran out of energy, Sage slumped down on the ground. His rolled-up sleeping bag was nearby. He grabbed it and jammed it under his head. Right there, he fell asleep, angry and crying.

  Several hours later, he awoke, freezing cold with his mouth parched from thirst. The stars blazed overhead and he could feel his body heat pouring off him in waves, disappearing into the cold Milky Way Galaxy shimmering overhead. He had no idea where his flashlight had gone during his tantrum. He groped around in the dark until he found a bottle of water and he downed the whole thing.

  With his thirst handled, he returned to his sleeping bag, yanked it from its sack and lay down in the dirt without a tarp or sleeping pad. He could taste the dust as he breathed, but he returned to sleep anyway.

  Several times that night, his thirst woke him, but he ignored it. After many hours, he finally awoke to the light of morning. As consciousness dawned, he heard people talking and laughing. Wakefulness came hard and he realized he was in danger.

  He had no idea how visible or vulnerable he was to the intruders.

  Highway 97, Westminster, Maryland

  Mat and Caroline decided to leave Maryland the next afternoon. It had probably been the first time he watched broadcast TV since he’d been at his grandmother’s house. With televised news of looting in New York City and Baltimore, on top of the chaos his brother described in California, Mat was motivated to get the hell out of Dodge. He didn’t know where to go, but heading closer to his family felt like the right thing to do.

  They were barely outside of town, driving west on Highway 97, when Mat’s phone chimed. He looked down at a text from a strange phone number in the 801 area code:

  “I left a bunch of gear you’re going to want in storage unit A5 at the Hampden EZ Storage. Bring a pair of bolt cutters. Thank you for taking care of Emily. Merry Christmas. Enjoy the NVGs.”

  “What’s that?” Caroline asked, edgy.

  “I’m not sure. I think it’s a text from a rich guy I know in Utah. I used to train his daughter.”

  “You used to train his daughter. Is that what you call it?” She smirked.

  “No, seriously. He pa
id me to train her in shooting and riding motorcycles. She’s a medical student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.”

  “Well, that’s weird. Is she still there? Do we have to go get her?”

  “I don’t know,” Mat answered, thinking it through. “Her dad isn’t asking me to check on her, so I guess she’s okay. The text says I can have his daughter’s stuff in her storage unit in Baltimore.”

  “We’re not going to Baltimore, though, right?”

  “We should consider it. We have a long drive and things are getting more fucked up by the minute. I saw the stuff he put in that storage unit and we might be better off taking a small detour to get it.”

  “But they’re looting in Baltimore, aren’t they?” Her eyes went wide. “Will we be safe?”

  Mat patted his AR-15 rifle, nestled between his seat and the center console. “This baby might be as illegal as fuck in Maryland, but I’m glad I have it. We should be all right.” He had also stashed a Glock in the door, along with three extra mags.

  Mat had all the weapons he needed, but the last line of the text convinced him that it would be worth the detour to hit the rich guy’s storage unit. Many times in the sand box, his night vision goggles, or NVGs, had transformed him into a superman of combat death, scything through enemy combatants like the God of the Old Testament. Even without all the other cool swag in that storage unit, Mat would have made the trip just for the NVGs.

  When they hit Highway 70, Mat turned east instead of west, barreling toward Baltimore.

  Hampden EZ Storage, Baltimore, Maryland

  Twenty feet inside the Hampden EZ Storage gates, Mat drew down on three men. His girl lay curled up in the passenger footwell, hiding behind the engine block.

  “GET THE FUCK BACK OR I WILL KILL YOU!” Mat screamed.

  The men stood, frozen, in front of Mat’s truck grill, their arms loaded with stuff they had apparently stolen from a storage locker. One by one they dropped their booty and ran back the way they had come, toward the back of the storage complex. Mat heard the chain-link fence rattle as one, two, then three men scampered over, somehow pushing through the barbed wire on top.

  Getting into Baltimore had been easy, since the gridlock was traveling only one way—out of Baltimore. Getting out of the city would be much more difficult than getting in. They would have to take side roads, and that meant more risk of confrontation. This latest altercation inside the storage center had been the third stare-down Mat and Caroline had made with local punks since getting off the interstate. They boiled it down to a system: Mat would jump out and point his Glock at the punks, Caroline would curl up in the footwell, and he would scream his intent to shoot them. So far, nobody had called his bluff, which was good, because he hadn’t been bluffing at all.

  Mat devolved into the well-worn tempo of combat. Most people thought of Army Rangers as something less than Navy SEALS, Delta Force and Marine Raiders—kind of a minor league version of American Special Forces operators. While there was some truth to the fact that the higher tiers of Special Forces often pulled from the ranks of Rangers, public perception ignored the reality that Rangers got more work than almost anyone. In terms of SOF combat, “more work” penciled out to highly desirable opportunities to trade hot rocks with the enemy.

  The officers at the Head Shed didn’t need as much intel to send in Army Rangers as they might need for the SEALs or Delta guys, presumably because those Tier One guys shit gold bricks or something. The Head Shed could send the Rangers any old time they felt like an enemy compound needed a look-see, and they would be more inclined to let the Rangers conduct “recon by fire,” hitting likely targets just to see what was what. The result: Army Rangers got a lot of work, and long-timers like Mat Best had fought countless direct action missions.

  After serving as an Army Ranger for five deployments, Mat cut over to the CIA, where the action ran hot and the money came in heavy. As an expendable pipe hitter for the State Department, he had seen plenty.

  So, when it came time to stare down bad guys at the barrel of a gun, it didn’t strike him as any more traumatic than getting in a tussle at a bar. After hundreds of repetitions, the endorphins of threatening and killing enemy combatants lost that old gut wrench. It wasn’t that Mat thought lightly of taking a life—quite the contrary. But his mind was largely anesthetized to the adrenaline hit of lethal combat. He could take incoming fire and laugh about it two minutes later.

  Once the hoodlums had run out of the EZ Storage, no doubt leaving chunks of their asses on the razor fence, Mat pulled around to Unit A5 and was pleased to see the lock unbroken, the door closed.

  “You’re good. You can sit up,” he reassured the girl. “We’re clear.”

  “How can you do that and just move on like it’s nothing?” she asked as she sat back in the seat, scanning for the looters who had disappeared while she was hiding. “How can you point a gun at people and then mosey down the road?”

  Mat recalled how civilians felt about conflict. “I’ve had a lot of those moments. I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of sociopath.”

  “No,” she answered, but the tone in her voice said maybe.

  “I’m a decent guy,” he reassured her as he dug around in the backseat for his bolt cutters. “I promise. I really am. I’m just… good at this stuff.” Mat stepped down from his truck, Glock in one hand, bolt cutters in the other, and checked his 360-degree perimeter for threats.

  He didn’t know how to explain his life to her, or to anyone else for that matter.

  He holstered his gun and popped the lock with the cutters. He rolled up the door and, as his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he could see that all the Ross girl’s stuff was there, neatly stacked on wire shelves and loaded onto a motorcycle trailer. Right off he could see twin motorbikes, six cans of gas, ammo canisters, two AK-47s, backpacks, cases of freeze-dried food, and a Pelican case that he hoped held a pair of NVGs. Mat pulled the Pelican case down, set it on the fender of the trailer, and popped it open with the hiss of equalizing air pressure. Inside he found a pair of white phosphor NVGs.

  Mat whistled. He’d expected the normal Gen 3 NVGs. The white phosphors must have set that rich dude back at least ten grand a pop. He had never been issued white phosphor. The Army had been too cheap to give Rangers top-of-the-line swag like this. He looked forward to driving his truck blacked out while sporting these babies. He had heard these NODs were the shiz-nizzle.

  He backed his Raptor up to the trailer and, luckily, had the right ball hitch for the trailer’s receiver. He didn’t want to linger in the storage center any longer than he had to—worried the looters would come back with friends and maybe take potshots at him through the perimeter fence. He hurried to get all the goods thrown in the back of his truck, including the fifty gallons of water stored in water cubes. When he came to the pair of REI backpacks, Mat tossed them into the backseat of the cab, curious about what they held inside. The Ross dude had been right about the storage shed—it was like the best Christmas ever for an Army Ranger.

  When the storage unit had been pillaged down to the last piece of gear, Mat hopped into the cab and drove away, leaving the rolling door open.

  On the corner of Pennsylvania and Fulton, Mat saw his first American murder.

  Neither he nor the girl knew enough about Baltimore to avoid the “bad areas” as they wove their way out of town, roughly paralleling the gridlocked I-70 freeway. As fate would have it, they had driven Mat’s Ford Raptor, loaded with vital supplies and pulling a trailer carrying two motorcycles, right into the heart of the worst looting and rioting he had ever seen.

  The corner shop where the murder happened ironically advertised itself as the “Friendly Fried Lake Trout, Chicken and Subs.” As Mat nudged through the intersection in bumper-to-bumper traffic, two men ran out of the shop, both armed with revolvers. An aging black man, his hair graying around the edges, burst through the door behind them and leveled a shotgun in their direction. The blast of the shotgun dropped one of the young
men, no older than twenty, on the sidewalk, not fifty yards from Mat’s truck. The other kid ran away, something cradled in his arms.

  The middle-aged man, hopping in agitation, bounced up to the dead kid, viciously kicked him until he flipped face-up, and dug a wad of cash out of the young man’s front pocket. He kicked the kid again for good measure, causing him to flop back face-down, his legs akimbo.

  The man argued out loud with himself, justifying the killing of the kid to anyone who might be listening and, without knowing what else to do, headed back into his shop.

  Mat’s first impulse was to stop his truck and render aid, but he thought better of it, especially in this neighborhood. He had seen enough dead men to know one when he saw one. The close-range buckshot had ripped off the top half of the kid’s shirt, chewing into his chest cavity and lower face, revealing bits of the vital organs once protected by the ribcage.

  “Keep driving, keep driving, keep driving,” Caroline begged in a whimper, hunched down in her seat, terrified.

  Mat inched along in his truck, passing through the intersection as he cradled the Glock in his lap. The neighborhood people kept moving, too, looking down at the boy but not gathering around the scene of the body to help or call the cops. They must have instinctively understood the new level of danger, and they kept walking down the street, speeding up their pace if anything.

  As Mat’s truck crawled past the “Friendly” store, a heavyset African-American woman ran past them, wailing, her hands flailing the air. She turned the corner where the young man had been killed and disappeared from view.

  Probably the mother, Mat thought to himself. He scanned his threat angles, checking the mirrors every ten seconds.