William Weber - Surviving America's Collapse

The heat from Al’s burning house was intense and the feeling running past it was like running your hand over a BBQ pit. Up ahead, Cain disappeared into the Hectors’ house. By the time John arrived a moment later, threads of orange flame and black smoke had already begun to spill out of the broken front windows. Cain must have lit the drapes on fire soon after entering.

He was trying to deter anyone from coming after him. A technique that might have worked on a regular man, but not John.

AR at the ready, John circled around back and entered the house through a yellow door. It led in through the Hectors’ garage. The important point was to avoid being where Cain was expecting him. He also wanted to ensure the drug-dealing thug hadn’t tried to escape through the backyard.

Inside, the ceiling was beginning to fill with black smoke. John moved purposefully from room to room, AR at the ready. It wasn’t the ideal weapon for close quarters, but he could have his S&W out of his drop-leg holster and in his hands in a split second if he needed to.

A figure zipped by him ten yards away and fled up the stairs to the second floor. John didn’t have enough time to take a clean shot and didn’t want to give his presence away just yet. He wanted to see the surprise on Cain’s face when he sent the man back to hell.

John grabbed a dishtowel from a rack in the kitchen and held it over his nose. He then proceeded toward the stairs and began mounting them. He would need to get this done quick since the fire downstairs was beginning to grow.

After reaching the top riser, John scanned the landing without seeing any sign of his target. Checking each bedroom was his next priority. He was about to enter the first when he heard a noise to his right. Cain was there about to fire his AK-47. John dropped to one knee, aimed in that direction and fired. The shots narrowly missed, blasting holes in the wall by Cain’s head. Splinters of wood and gyprock blinded Cain and he fell back into one of the front bedrooms. As he did, the AK fell from his hands and landed in the hallway.

Weapon or not, this was a dangerous place to be since the fire raging below them was directly underneath the room Cain had retreated to. John pressed on nevertheless. He needed to finish this, even if it meant further risking his own life.

Black smoke inched down at him from the ceiling. John did his best to keep low.

When John reached the doorway, he saw Cain fiddling madly with a stuck window. Perhaps sensing him there, Cain turned and immediately charged toward John.

John squeezed the trigger right as the floor at Cain’s feet gave way, swallowing him whole. Flames licked up through the opening as though John’s prediction had been right and hell itself had taken him back.

John turned and began to make his way downstairs to be sure the job was done. When he reached the first floor the flames in the front of the house where Cain had fallen through were raging out of control. No one could have survived that and John decided to retreat and help with the other beleaguered defenders before he was overcome by fumes. Surely with their leader gone, the criminals’ will to fight would die as well.

The scene that greeted John was one of complete carnage. The bodies of friend and foe lay side by side, an image that reminded him of accounts from the Civil War. Soldiers had often described the dead being so thick they could walk from one end of a battlefield to the other without touching the ground.

There was enough space between each of the houses that the fires wouldn’t jump, but already three homes across the street were reduced to smoldering ash. So was Al’s house.

Here and there, sporadic gunfire broke the eerie silence, but the peak of the battle had passed. Now that Cain was gone, John rushed back to his own house so that it too wasn’t torched. The pod was designed to be fireproof, that wasn’t the problem. It was the oxygen getting cut off in the event of a fire that worried him most.

When he was nearly there, dark figures ran toward the park on their way out of Willow Creek. They were carrying jugs of water and large sacks presumably stuffed with canned goods. He lowered himself onto one knee, peered through his Trijicon ACOG scope and shot three of them dead. The last managed to dart behind cover before he could finish the job.

The street was in complete shambles. With Cain dead and his thugs on the run, it appeared the people of Willow Creek had won, but at what cost? No one would know until dawn when they would begin to tally their losses.

John slept slumped in a chair in his kitchen, the Kel-Tec KSG laid across his lap. He’d dragged the dented steel plate back into place and waited for the light to come. There’d been an eerie silence outside and John couldn’t help wonder which of his friends and neighbors had survived.

Finally, faint light began to trickle in through the now shattered front windows. John peered outside for any signs of Cain’s men. The prospect was doubtful. He would have heard them looting and pillaging throughout the night but all he’d heard was deathly silence.

The sight outside was sobering. Men and women with red bandanas mixed with Cain’s thugs were dead and scattered for as far as John could see. A few stunned figures had emerged from their homes, most of them bloody. They staggered among the dead, weeping. It really did look like a battlefield and when things were finally put right, John hoped there would be some sort of memorial here to the people who’d given up their lives for the right to live without fear of oppression.

John went down to the pod and got Diane and the kids. They were visibly frightened and had stayed up throughout the night. Even buried underground, they’d still heard the battle going on topside. They were sure no one was left and John didn’t have the heart to tell them that they might be right.

“Oh, your ears,” Diane said when she saw the blood. “We heard the explosion and thought the house had been hit by an RPG.”

“You’re not too far from the truth,” he told her. “But my hearing’s already coming back.”

“Did we win at least, Dad?” Gregory asked.

John ruffled his son’s hair. “It looks that way, son, but we paid a heavy price.”

The concern on Diane’s face intensified. Her worst fears had become a reality.

The idea of going upstairs and letting his kids see what lay outside was gut-wrenching. No child should see that. But there was no way around it. They would need to find the survivors and salvage what they could. Cain and his men seemed to have been defeated, but who knew what other groups were out there waiting to take his place.

No words could soften the blow, it was simply something they would have to experience.

He brought them upstairs and when he opened the front door they gasped. Tears streamed down Diane’s face. Her hands went to her quivering lips. “Oh God, John. Oh God.”

A handful of others were outside now, checking on the bodies, engaged in the gruesome task of sorting the dead from the wounded. There weren’t many of the latter.

After that was done, John quickly organized the people he could find into search parties who went house to house, trying to find more survivors who’d hidden from the battle. In all, twenty people were left. Twenty residents of Willow Creek out of over a hundred.

The cost of victory was staggering. But it was only when they began counting the dead that two things became apparent.

The first was that Cain had lost nearly two hundred men.

The second was that Al and Missy were nowhere to be found.

Diane pointed to their house, which was now a heap of ashes. “That’s probably where they are.”