Ryan Westfield - Getting Out

Mandy was too choked up to speak. She suddenly realized that she cared for Max. She didn’t want to see him go, but she knew that there was no way she could convince him otherwise. He was a headstrong individual. Once he made up his mind, he was going to follow through with his plan. She had to believe in him. She had to have confidence in him. She had to have faith that it would work out. But she couldn’t rely on something as nebulous as faith. She had to make things happen. There was no fate at work out here in the woods, after the fall of civilization. Things were what you made of them, not what was handed to you.

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.