Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

“So what do you think he’s doing, Danny?” Dad asked.

“I think… there wasn’t a Montana map in that case. We never figured to go through that far west. We knew we had to get to Rapid City as fast as we could. If I were him and I laid out those maps, I’d see a general route we’d be taking. I’d try to get ahead of us, but not too far, and I’d try to cover all our options to be absolutely certain to get us. I don’t think he’s looking at Montana. I could be wrong, but I think he’s set up to cut us off before we get to South Dakota. On this map there are three main routes south. If we take any one of them, I think we’re dead. I think the only way to go is the fourth, through Montana, and hope we sneak by on the outside.”

Again, no one responded. What he said made sense, but then he continued with the thought in the back of our minds. “But.” He again looked at us. “What if he thought there was no Montana map in there because we had that one with us and needed it for our route? What if he is, or isn’t, as smart as we give him credit for? And what if that was his logical reasoning all along? What if that seemed so obvious to him and he took all of his men to the same route? He’d be going all in with his chips, but if that’s what he did and we walk right into it, we’re dead. No doubt.”

Dad finally spoke. “I don’t think he did that, Danny.”

“Okay.” Danny looked at him and waited, suggesting he continue.

Dad started pacing. “In a poker game, that would be like going all in without looking at your cards. Or in chess, like leaving your queen in an open diagonal line with your opponent’s bishop. Maybe you’d get lucky. Or maybe you’d lose your best advantage. I don’t think he plays that way. This guy seems like he understands the way we think. If he does, he can’t be thinking we’d go through Montana. It wasn’t on any of the maps, and it’s out of our way. It’s the longer way to get to where we want to go. He can’t think we’re going there.”

“Let’s say I agree with you,” Danny responded. “How many of you are completely comfortable with the decision to go that way?”

We all raised our hands. Either way we had no way of knowing what we were walking into, and who knew if we would even make it that far. Or maybe we’d overestimated this captain and he was nowhere near us, and our worries about his ambitions were in vain.

“Okay then,” Danny continued. “It’s almost dark.” Pointing at Blake and Nathan, he asked, “You two know the roads around here pretty well, right?” They nodded. “We need to travel as remotely as possible out of this park, and then we need to cut over to Montana without coming close to the interstate. Can that be done?” Again they nodded and started discussing the best possible route. “I’ll leave it to you,” Danny said. “You get me to Highway 7 in Montana, and I’ll take it from there.”

“Got it,” Blake said.

“Perfect.” Danny patted him on the shoulder, walking towards the trucks. “We leave in an hour.”

I could almost hear our hearts pounding off the walls of the cave. He came walking back a minute later with a shovel Tara’s dad had given us. “Let’s clear the entrance out and get ready to go.”

A little more than 150 miles south of the cave, Captain Eddie had moved his men into concealed ambush positions where the three roads south met Highway 20. Comfortable their THIRST systems could blanket ten miles in every direction, he was satisfied they had the sixteen to twenty mile gaps between their three patrols covered. On the other hand, one outlier still troubled him, and that was the alternative route down through Montana. Two times now he’d had these people where he should have been able to capture them. If they made it past him a third time, he was going to start looking incompetent to his own men, and nothing led to rebellion quicker than incompetence. Highway 323 south through Montana was only eighteen miles west of the men on Camp Crook Road, but that was beyond the extent of their radar. If he was to believe the intel numbers, he was confident he could take a few members from each of the three current squads and send twelve men to guard the Montana route. He had an extra THIRST set, and that would cover every likely American travel scenario, so he decided to do just that. It would weaken each patrol a little, but not enough to hurt them against a dozen or so lightly armed, unsuspecting Americans.

He constructed a fourth patrol, with four jeeps and twelve soldiers, and sent them into Montana due west of the men on Camp Crook Road. He and his brother stayed with the men on the most direct southern road, Highway 85. The clock on the dashboard of his armored truck read 8:05. It was pitch black out. His “lions” had to be on the move.

We left the caves, lights off, under the cover of darkness. Blake and Nathan, in the lead truck, guided us through the back roads of the national park, along the river, and onto a gravel road running adjacent to the interstate. We reconvened in Montana at the edge of Lamesteer National Wildlife Refuge. So far, so good.

We continued down Highway 7, implementing several detours for safety purposes, to the small town of Ekalaka. Nathan had worked at a camp near here for a couple summers, and he believed we could find food and medical supplies there to replace some of what we’d lost at the bunker. Sure enough, a vacant Camp Needmore provided us with a generator-powered freezer and a well-stocked pantry in the main kitchen. We packed two coolers full of ice and meat and grabbed all the canned goods we could. We also found plenty of other supplies, including four relatively new mountain bikes. As we left, we unplugged the near empty gas-powered generator and took it with us too.

We were well behind where we had hoped to be, but still alive, and hadn’t yet run into signs of any troops. We were about one hundred miles from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, now and therefore within 150 miles of Rapid City. Danny’s goal was to get Tara, Emily, Blake, and Nathan close to the backside of Mount Rushmore, close to Tara’s farm, and then move the rest of us deeper into the Black Hills before daylight. At this point, that was going to be a stretch. We knew we were sacrificing the ideal isolation of our current path to head down a more harrowing passage, into a once heavily populated area. As risky moves go, this was a 10.

Exiting the camp, Danny and I traded places with Blake and Nathan as the lead truck. We were about four miles south of the camp when Wes’s THIRST monitor flashed bright red and beeped loudly. Danny flashed the hazards twice and braked to a sudden halt. The three trucks behind us did the same. He shut off our truck and signaled the others to follow suit. We watched the screen, but nothing appeared. We still weren’t sure of the radar’s scope, but we figured it was somewhere between ten and twenty. The system had proven itself incredibly sensitive and accurate. We’d been able to pick up deer, skunks, rabbits, and low-flying birds as tiny red dots on the screen, but none of those had made the screen flash. This flash had been a big one, and the first time the screen had ever made a sound.

This was something new, and it probably wasn’t good. What made matters worse is the red flash hadn’t been a dot on the screen, but rather more an indicator of nearby radar. Ours had overlapped with someone’s, but we had no idea where the source physically was. Chances were, whatever had pinged us had received the same ping back, and they were watching their screen as intently as we were. But could they see us?