Getting Out

31

Max stepped off the trail into the woods, pretending he was going to take a leak. He let Mandy, Georgia, James, Sadie, and Chad pass him by.

He stayed there for a moment as he watched them disappear into the woods, down the trail. They would be at the farmhouse soon enough. Hopefully he would get there too.

He was glad that Georgia was with them. She knew how to shoot properly, and it seemed like her son had some training as well. The others would be lucky to get off a single good shot if they were facing a real enemy.

There were a thousand things that could go wrong with this plan.

But Max had to do it.

He briefly considered how much his position had changed in such a short time. He’d started out only interested in helping himself. Now he was risking his own life to help the others, others he hadn’t known for more than a few days, with the exception of Chad.

But Max knew that he didn’t have much of a chance of surviving on his own. Just like the others needed him, he needed them. It might be possible for him to grow his own food somehow in the future by just himself, but he knew that the possibility of actually pulling it off drastically increased with each extra person he had with him.

Max didn’t think about this too long. He had other things to occupy himself with.

He still had his heavy pack on, since he couldn’t have asked someone else to carry it. It would severely limit the speed at which he could travel. But at least he’d made a great effort to secure everything on the outside of the pack so that nothing rattled around. During lunch, he’d reorganized things on the inside of his pack, moving them around, putting soft things between hard metal things, to reduce the noise that he would make.

He had a compass with him, and Mandy had explained to him exactly how to get to the farmhouse through the woods. All he had to do was follow the hiking trail until he reached a certain creek. Then from there it wasn’t far to the road, cutting through an old field. The farmhouse was off the road, at the end of a long private drive. In the future, Max hoped to cover the entrance to the private drive with brush. If he did that and removed any mailbox that might still be there, it would make the place almost invisible from the road.

Max had vague memories of the farmhouse as a kid, a large old building on a huge property. Not that property boundaries mattered now. But what did matter was that Max knew that the soil was good. It had been good before, and nothing had changed. It would be good in the future too.

Max held one of Georgia’s rifles, and his Glock was still in its holster where it belonged.

Max had initially planned on retracing their steps, to find the person who’d been following them. But now that he was apart from the group, he realized that it would be better just to stay put. That way, he could catch whoever it was coming along the trail, without any chance of missing them.

Max set his pack down next to a tree. There were some dead leaves, and Max used them to cover the pack. He put some dead branches on top of it as well.

Then, in case someone spotted the back, he moved about twenty feet away from it, further off the trail, but still in view from it.

The hunting rifle was nothing fancy, but it worked, and it had a good, accurate scope on it.

Max, moving more freely without being burdened by the pack for the first time in a long while, lay down on his stomach. He wanted to keep himself out of view as much as possible.

He positioned the rifle comfortably in front of him, and put his eye to the scope. With its magnification, he could see much farther than he could otherwise. While that was a huge advantage, he realized that the narrow nature of the scope might cause him to miss someone coming at him from his periphery. It was the old sniper’s problem, and the reason that so many snipers had lookouts there.

So Max had to play the game of putting his eye to the scope and then removing it periodically. He didn’t allow himself to get stuck in just one “setting,” or he knew that he could easily miss someone approaching.

Ten minutes went by, as Max lay there, diligently switching between the scope and his normal eyesight. Twenty minutes went by. Still nothing.

Then Max saw something. Off in the distance. A flash of red.

Max put his eye to the scope again. He could clearly see with the magnification a very thin man moving through the woods. He didn’t seem to have a pack on him, or any gear whatsoever. He wore a red long-sleeved shirt, that must have been hot in this weather.

He had long, greasy, uncombed hair that hung down around his face.

Max paused, thinking. Who was this man? He didn’t fit any profile that Max could think of.

He wasn’t a soldier, and he didn’t seem to have a gun. He didn’t look like an ordinary citizen, with his long greasy hair. He certainly wasn’t a hippie or a pothead. He was…

Then it hit Max.

The prisons.

The man must have been an escaped prisoner. That would make perfect sense. He had that gaunt look that Max had come to expect from prisoners. He’d spent some time in years past volunteering at local prisons. He’d found it valuable and interesting for a time, but gradually had given it up. Over time, Max had found that the prisoners who didn’t know how to read, in large part, did not want to learn.

Max thought it through. The EMP must have damaged the prison’s security system. Max imagined that any good prison would have some kind of backup generator, but that would only last for a certain amount of time. Prisons were built for power outages, but they weren’t built for the end of civilization. There might have been a riot, a rebellion, or the guards might have simply abandoned the prison to tend to their own families. The doors might have simply automatically popped open, if they were electronically controlled, when the generator had stopped.

Or he might be a single lone prisoner.

There was no way to know right now.

Max looked around, his eye leaving the scope for a moment. He didn’t see anyone near him.

He put his eye back to the scope, and got the crosshairs right on the gaunt man’s head. Max knew he could put one right into his forehead. The man would die instantly. He wouldn’t feel much pain. Just an instant of terror and confusion. And then he would be gone, dead to everything.

Max paused. Was it ethical to simply kill the man? After all, Max realized quite well that he was merely hypothesizing about his potential prisoner status.

What if the man was just like Max, Georgia, or Mandy? What if he’d been through hell the last few days, and was wandering the woods without provisions, looking for a way to survive like everyone else?

Should Max confront him, head on? That was Max’s instinct, to confront the man like a man, to speak to him and to question him. But at that point, it would just be the man’s word. Max would have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth or not.

He had a bad feeling about the gaunt man. A feeling deep in his gut.

Max knew the safe thing to do was to pull the trigger.

He moved his finger inside the trigger guard, feeling the trigger against the end of his index finger.

Max knew he had to shoot the man, but he didn’t want to.

He hesitated just a moment too long.

He heard something off to his side, but it was already too late. Something struck him on the torso. Something sharp.

Someone was there with a knife. Max understood the situation quickly. He didn’t yet feel the pain from the cut, but he knew that it was bad. It was a sort of strange background awareness he had.

Max turned, gripping the rifle with both hands, and jammed the butt as hard as he could into his attacker.

The man fell, the rifle colliding with his side. Max heard a sickening crunching sound.

Max managed to scramble up to his feet. The adrenaline was pumping through him, but he was also starting to feel the pain from the wound.

His attacker was a man with a completely shaved head. He had tattoos all over his face and his arms. He wore a wife beater t-shirt. He clearly was some kind of escaped inmate. Max’s initial assessment had been correct.

Max knew that the man in the red would be approaching. Max didn’t have much time. He needed to deal with this man first before the red shirted man arrived.

But Max was wounded. It was hard to move his right arm, and when he did, the pain seared through him like a red hot poker. Why couldn’t the pain have taken a little longer to kick in?

The convict on the ground grunted. He opened his mouth, full of rotting teeth that had been filed down to vicious-looking points. He roared something unintelligible, some curse.

Max knew he didn’t have time to waste. Holding the rifle in his left hand, he reached for his Glock and drew it.

The man sprung up from the ground in an instant, charging Max.

Max’s finger squeezed the trigger, letting loose two rounds which hit the convict in the chest. He screamed and fell heavily, the holes in his chest visible through his shirt.

Before Max could do anything else, something heavy hit him in the back.

He knew who it was in an instant. It was the man in the red shirt. It felt like his fist had hit Max hard in the back.

The blow made Max reel, falling forward. He managed to catch himself from falling, stepping forward with his right leg.

The man behind him rushed Max from behind, slamming his weight into Max’s back.

Max fell forward, right towards the convict he’d just shot in the chest. He held both guns as tightly as he could, knowing that he could not relinquish them.

But the convict, despite being gaunt, was surprisingly strong. He seized the rifle while Max was lying on top of the dead man. The attacker had too much leverage, since Max held the rifle with only one hand towards the muzzle. Max couldn’t hold onto it for much longer. A second later, the rifle had been ripped from his hand.

Now his attacker was armed with a hunting rifle.

Max acted quickly, wasting no time in thinking.

Despite the pain, Max spun over onto his left side. He raised his right arm, pointing his Glock at his attacker, who was already raising the rifle.

Max’s finger squeezed the trigger, and the Glock fired.

The round hit the attacker in the leg. Max’s aim had been off from the pain, from the strange angle, from firing quickly, from being disoriented.

Max saw in slow motion as his attacker squeezed the trigger of the rifle.

Max gritted his teeth upon impact. He felt the round slam into his thigh. The pain ravaged his body, a searing hot sensation burning through his nerves.

The attacker’s aim had been bad. Just like Max’s first shot.

But Max wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

He steadied his right arm as best he could, keeping the Glock straight. He took his time. He took a deep breath and held it. He had it lined up perfectly.

Before his attacker could fire another round, Max’s finger squeezed the trigger of his Glock.

The bullet hit the attacker square in the middle of his forehead. His lifeless body crumbled to the forest floor.

Max felt the intense pain. It was trying to overwhelm him, but Max wasn’t going to let it. He wasn’t done yet. He had to keep going.

Max lay silently on his side. It was too much effort to keep his right arm up, so he let it fall to the forest floor.

There were no more sounds. No animals. And no convicts.

Max knew it was the end of the battle.

For now.

There had just been two of them.

It was good that Max had got them before they’d gotten to the group. If the convicts had snuck up on them, it might have been disastrous.

Max struggled to stay conscious.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he sat up slightly to examine his leg. This seemed to take all his strength.

The wound was bleeding.

But he could still move his leg and he could still move his foot, ever so slightly.

He wasn’t going to die. Not yet.

Max tore off his shirt and used it to fashion a rudimentary tourniquet, as well as a bandage. He cut the shirt into long strips and was able to use these to do what he needed to do.

The bleeding somewhat under control, Max tried to stand, but he immediately fell over. He fell with a painful thud on the ground, his head smacking into a piece of dead wood. But he shook off the pain.

OK, so he couldn’t put weight on his leg.

Max looked around for something to use as a crutch. He remembered Georgia’s story about fashioning a crutch from a sapling.

On all fours, moving slowly, Max moved to a small sapling. He took his pocket knife from his pocket and sawed at the sapling’s base. It seemed to take forever, but in the end, he had a serviceable crutch.

Max wrapped some fabric around the end of it, to make it less painful as it stuck into his armpit.

It wasn’t perfect, but Max wasn’t going to bleed out immediately, and he could move.

He recovered the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, made sure his Glock was in its holster, and went to recover his pack.

He knew intuitively that he couldn’t carry the pack all the way back, at least not the way it was currently loaded down.

Max opened the pack and started discarding things that wouldn’t be essential. That was the idea, at least. But unfortunately so much of what he had was essential. But he simply wasn’t going to be able to carry it all.

He knew he needed to get to the farmhouse. It might take him a very long time, given how difficult it was for him to walk. He kept extra ammo for the Glock and the rifle. He kept food and water, which he would need for the journey. He kept the water filters that they would need in the future. He kept his emergency medical kit, which he didn’t bother trying to use now, since he knew that he didn’t know what he was doing with it, and he didn’t know what else he could do now for a gunshot wound.

It was only in thinking of the medical kit that Max remembered being cut. He paused to examine the wound. It wasn’t as bad as he’d initially thought. It was a long cut, but it wasn’t deep, and the bleeding had mostly stopped.

Max took the provisions that he wasn’t bringing along, which was the majority of what had been in the pack, and carefully buried it under the same leaves he’d used to cover the pack. He took his pocket knife out and carved a single line in one of the trees, to serve as a marker for some future date. In the future, he could come back and recover the provisions. There might come a time when they meant the difference between life and death.

Shouldering his lightened pack, gritting his teeth against the pain, Max set off, limping with his crutch. His eyes studied the forest around him, and he was alert. He listened to the sounds. He wasn’t going to be ambushed, no matter what condition he was in.