Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

Captain Eddie ordered the lights off on all their vehicles as they rounded the corner near the base of Camp Crook Road, heading towards the radio signal ahead. It hadn’t moved since he’d first begun tracking it, so either they were lying in wait or they’d pitched it. He figured it was the latter, since no other heat signatures had shown up on their radar yet, not even as close as they were right now. But he also knew he couldn’t ignore the possibility it might be some kind of trap. Acknowledging that option was probably giving the Americans more credit than they deserved, but they’d fooled him before. Several times. Caution was in order here.

As expected, there was no one with the radio, easily located in the roadside ditch. Trap? Ha! He’d already received the message that none of the twelve soldiers he’d stationed on Highway 323 had survived. His men had found the bodies, each with a single bullet hole. Precise. Professional. Military. The scout had fired off the flare, but the troops to their east hadn’t seen it or heard any gunfire. Then again, eighteen miles was a considerable distance away.

Looking south down the highway, Eddie had the impulse to jump back in his jeep and race after the Americans. His diagonal route here couldn’t have missed them by much. They couldn’t be that far ahead, and he did have twenty men with him. But the rest of his men were a few miles away and would be here soon. It wouldn’t hurt to wait a few more minutes. At best, the Americans would have a thirty-minute lead, be traveling much slower, and not have the luxury of using their lights. He knew he and his men could make up the distance in a hurry. They’d probably catch them by Belle Fourche.

He saw headlights approaching and counted. Twelve sets. All his men. Two trucks and ten jeeps. He hopped back into the passenger seat of his jeep. “Let’s go,” he commanded. His driver spun the wheel and whipped the jeep around. They had pulled back onto the road and gone about a hundred yards when there was a huge explosion and brilliant arching fireball behind them. The driver slammed on the brakes, and Eddie instinctively rolled out of the jeep to one knee. He jumped to his feet, gun up, and looked back in shock as flames leapt high into the sky. He took several steps towards the flames, gun ready, until he was certain he wasn’t in any imminent danger.

A few seconds ago, there had been a bridge behind them, and now there was nothing more than a giant gaping crater. Even worse, all his soldiers were stuck on the other side. He grabbed his head with both hands, yanked his hat off in frustration, and then ordered the men with him to go help. They rushed back to the bridge and looked down. The front jeep had been torn to shreds, all three passengers certainly killed. The second jeep was no longer drivable but otherwise intact, all three passengers alive and scaling the walls of the ravine back up the other side. The riverbed was low enough at several points for the vehicles to cross, but they were down three more men now and two more jeeps. Eddie’s company, eighty men strong a couple days ago, had been whittled down even further to fifty-eight.

It took half an hour to find a manageable crossing point, get all the vehicles across, and start moving south again. Eddie knew they’d lost valuable time, and yet that wasn’t as troubling as a few other revelations. The Americans were starting to get aggressive. How had they snuck up on his twelve armed men and taken them out without being seen or without his men sending out a radio alert? Surely his soldiers had been watching the radar. He’d been calling in on the radio every thirty minutes. It didn’t make sense to him. He knew the purpose of the bridge explosion was to slow him down, but the action had sent another message, too. These weren’t amateurs. It wasn’t lost on Eddie that had he not taken a different route, he’d have been in the first jeep that exploded. His haste and negligence would have resulted in the ultimate waste. He was fortunate he’d sent men to this alternate route, or the Americans would have passed in the night without a trace. Sure, he could have gambled and had all his men on this route, but that could have backfired too. He knew he had to accept this as yet another loss on a frustrating losing streak.

To keep it from happening again, Eddie had four of his men stay behind with a jeep for investigative purposes. When daylight came, he wanted them to scout the camp where his twelve men had been killed and radio in what they found before catching back up to them. He was curious how many people it had taken to wipe out his men and whether they’d be able to determine how it was executed. At least now he knew where the Americans were, and the trail was smoking hot. He was more convinced than ever he’d catch them any day now, if not tonight.

From now on he would make a point to send a scout jeep ahead to check every bridge for explosives. He couldn’t afford to underestimate these Americans anymore. These lions knew how to use guns and explosives, and he’d never had to hunt that kind of cat before.

Nine. The number of lives a cat is credited with. Eight. The number of people we’d left Minnesota with, who were still alive. Seven. Supposedly a lucky number…

At some point our good luck was bound to expire. The problem was, if we were running out of it, we weren’t even halfway to Hawaii.

I could tell by the way Danny kept glancing in the rearview mirror he thought the captain and his men might be close. At best, we were going forty-five miles per hour. With lights they could easily go sixty-five to seventy on these roads. In an hour they could gain at least twenty miles on us. I was reminded at this point of a YouTube video where a guy asks his girlfriend how far she can go in an hour if she’s going sixty miles per hour and, for the life of her, she cannot figure it out. I smiled for a second and thought about sharing my thoughts with the others before snapping back to reality. Think of where you are, idiot! Hopefully no one had been watching me. Thank God it was dark. I glanced at Danny. He glared at me. Crap. This wasn’t funny. When you’re expecting at any second to see the headlights of a dozen vehicles packed with men out to kill you, it sobers you up pretty quick.

I was driving the front truck now with Danny in the passenger seat, his eyes seldom leaving the radar screen. Tara, Hayley, and Emily were in the back. Dad was driving the next truck with Wes, Mom, and Isaac. Behind them was Sam, driving the truck with Kate and Jenna. The last truck had Blake and Nathan in the front seat and Cameron in the back with the box of grenades and our only two “big” (.50 caliber) guns. We had passed the South Dakota border sign a few miles back and were rapidly approaching the Belle Fourche city limits. A few days ago, Belle Fourche had been a bustling city with a population around six thousand, the proud geographic center of the fifty United States. Today it was nothing more than another ghost town in the middle of a country in ruin.

I don’t know what possessed me to start up another conversation with Tara at that point. The last one went so well . Perhaps it was the realization we were close to where we were planning to drop them off and I might never see her again. Maybe it was to make myself feel better about keeping my distance, to prove to my daughter that I could be an adult. Ha! Or maybe I was a little nervous. Yeah, maybe… Whatever it was, I asked one question and, based on the glare I received from Hayley, it was the wrong one. “Tara, what does your husband do?”

Hayley mouthed, “What the heck?” at me in the mirror, and I knew the depth of my blunder. Dang it.