Silent Interruption (Book 3): An Uncertain Passage Read online

  An Uncertain Passage

  Silent Interruption Book 3

  Trent Russell

  Copyright © 2018 by Trent Russell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter One

  The farmhouse looked too good to be true.

  Carl Mathers and his party had journeyed a long way in just one day to make it here. They had crossed through a small suburb, navigated in and out of a forest of pine trees, and journeyed across a railroad track just to make it to the small hill that lay nearby. After scouting around the side of the hill, Carl and his companions discovered this elegant-looking farmhouse in the distance.

  The dwelling was a sight for sore eyes. First, it appeared undamaged. No one had taken a torch to it. Nobody had shot it full of bullet holes. A mob of intruders had not tried barging through its doors or smashing through its windows. The dwelling was a picture of serenity. It was sad that Carl and his friends had to be concerned with finding a safe home that wasn’t damaged, but unfortunately the times had taken a sour turn.

  Second, the house seemed empty of residents. Carl suspected as much when they first had arrived at the hill. They checked out the place from a distance using binoculars or the long-range scope from Tara’s rifle, and discovered no movement inside. Even while Carl’s group slept beyond the hill with Carl or someone else in the party keeping watch, there were no signs of any lamps or candles being lit inside this house. Even if someone did light up a candle out of range of a window, it seemed strange with the sheer number of large windows that not one of them could catch some of the light emanating from a person’s candlewick or lantern.

  Even as Carl started his approach onto the land surrounding the farmhouse, the house remained still. There was no reaction from inside the home’s windows. Still, Carl took no chances. He would not even speak to his friends. Instead, everything was communicated in hand signals. He directed his instructions to the men behind him, Harold and Lorenzo. Each of them was armed with a rifle, as was Carl. Their mission was entirely peaceful, but they were prepared to defend themselves if needed.

  The home’s beauty increased as Carl drew in closer. The country house was a two story with small balconies up on top just below the roof, one in the front, and one in the back. Wooden panels made up the walls, with a finish of stones that ringed the house on the lower part of the wall about two feet high. It had porches in the front and off to the sides. A wooden rocking chair by the side porch rocked very gently with the soft breeze that blew by. Carl could hear a slight creak from the chair as he closed in.

  A satellite dish was mounted on the roof overlooking the right-side porch. Carl couldn’t help but be amused by it. The dish was out of place for such a rustic-looking home, a display of technology meant to offer modernity to a classic structure. Yet today, the dish was utterly useless, as were the electronics that most likely were inside the house. Sadly, the plumbing inside would be just as functional as the electronics.

  Carl’s boots hit the driveway that ran alongside the house. No vehicles were present, another sign that the residents were away, at least possibly. There was a good reason Carl and his party had not seen a car riding on a road for the past few days – almost no cars would be able to start up and drive down any road. If the home’s owners had returned in the last couple of days, they would have had to do so on foot.

  The lack of residents meant that the home might possibly be theirs. If the owners were in no position to return, this house could shelter all of them, and any home that possibly could shelter the twelve people who made up Carl’s party was nothing to sneeze at. The fact that this home was in such good shape made the proposition even more enticing.

  Carl crossed past the wall toward the front door. He stopped. The front door was not closed all the way.

  He raised his hand in a “stop” signal. Something was wrong. If these people had gotten wind of the chaos going on in the world, then there was no way they would leave their door open like this.

  Harold signaled to Carl. He pointed his thumb to the house. Carl interpreted it as “Who’s going to go in?”

  Carl pointed to his chest. He would take point and enter. Carl always would be the first to take the risk. His Marine training dictated that he could not do otherwise, even if some of his friends were outdoorsmen or possessed military training of their own.

  Carl inched along the wall. Once at the door, he inched it open slowly, raising his rifle into the yawning darkness. He pushed the door all the way open and received no response, no gunfire, not even a shout. Carl had revealed a foyer that led into a hallway with open passages. A staircase loomed to the right.

  Carl turned and motioned to Harold and Lorenzo and said “Cover me.” The former Marine then proceeded into the foyer and then into the hall. The hall’s first opening was off into the home’s living room.

  Carl’s heart quickened. The living room was ransacked. An end table’s drawers were yanked out and laid on their sides, their contents spilled out onto the floor. A couch was pushed to the side, exposing the back wall. A DVD player and a satellite TV box were ripped out of the wall and tossed onto the floor. The large TV screen attached to the floor remained untouched. Carl initially was surprised, but then remembered that a television screen would be worthless to anyone without working electronics. He doubted the invaders had managed to preserve a functional antenna or other TV reception equipment.

  They’ll look for food, water, maybe valuables like gold, Carl thought. He then turned to Harold and Lorenzo. The two men appeared more stunned than Carl, not a surprise as neither of them were trained to handle situations such as this. Lorenzo had spent time hunting while Harold was an experienced outdoorsman and survivalist, but neither was experienced in wartime situations.

  There were no bodies in the living room, nor did anyone lunge out to attack Carl and his companions. That meant the survivors or victims were elsewhere in the house, assuming they had not been kidnapped. Carl returned his attention to the two men with him. Then he motioned to the hall beyond. Carl would proceed. Lorenzo and Harold were to keep on guard.

  The hall’s next opening led to the home’s dining room, which was even worse off than the living room. The floor was coated with shattered dishes. Carl wondered if they were broken out of fun, spite, or just plain stupidity. Empty dishes had all kinds of functions. A loss of electricity didn’t make them useless. A glass cabinet by the dining table yawned open, its glass doors and walls all broken and smashed.

  No bodies, Carl thought. God, please let it stay that way. Let these people just be gone.

  By now Carl’s party inside the farmhouse had expanded to include Alicia, the wife of Lorenzo. Alicia, a short full-figured woman, clutched her weapon as she stepped through the front door. Carl spun around and looked at Lorenzo with a glare. Alicia shouldn’t come in here, Carl conveyed with his
hand signals. Now that sure signs of danger existed, Carl didn’t want either women or children to enter this home. The children he had brought with them already had been told to wait outside. Although, as Harold pointed out in the case of his two boys, they were capable of defending themselves. Carl respected that fact, but vowed to clear the house before allowing the children inside. So, Carl had dictated that Tara and Preston keep watch over them.

  Lorenzo walked back to Alicia, whose frown told Carl that she wouldn’t leave the home without protest. Carl felt a little guilty. Alicia was a brave woman, perhaps more outspoken than he was used to, but the savagery of what Carl had seen so far alarmed him. What would these invaders do to a woman if they got a hold of her? Carl didn’t want to find out.

  Finally, Carl’s boots crossed the threshold into the home’s kitchen. A musty, hot smell crossed his nostrils. The stench nearly overwhelmed him until he forced himself to walk forward.

  My God, Carl thought. This is the stench of the dead. He recognized it all too well. His tours of service had taken him into Iraq and other countries where Islamic terrorists holed up in secret camps and locales. More than once Carl had burst into a safe house only to find victims of their savagery having been dead for days. Those days when he discovered the dead before they could be saved were the hardest for Carl, along with those when his fellow Marines fell in battle.

  Carl’s boot kicked against something. He looked down. A human arm lay draped across the kitchen floor tiles in a pool of blood. Carl followed the limb to its owner – a teenage boy.

  A quick search of the house revealed the worst. The rest of the rooms had been ransacked, with no survivors at all. The teenager lying in the kitchen was only the first body Carl’s party had discovered.

  A child was discovered in a hall closet. He must have fled there when the break-in first started. A few bullet holes marred the white wooden door where the child had taken shelter. In his mind, Carl played over the grisly scenario that likely took place – the kid might have made a noise that alerted the invaders, or the gunmen simply opened fire thinking someone may have hidden in there. The child was also young, very young, perhaps younger than Shyanne.

  Carl’s trip upstairs to the bedroom yielded another victim. A woman appearing to be in her thirties lay in her bed, topless, with bruises and cuts across her body. She was no doubt the mother of this family. Her presence and condition confirmed Carl’s fears about the home’s invaders’ attitude toward women. In anger, he punched the bedroom mirror right in the middle of the glass.

  Finally, Carl and Harold discovered the patriarch of this family in the garage. His hands were tied behind his back with zip ties. He lay slumped over, dried blood trickling from the back of his head. The invaders had dragged him in here and shot him in the head.

  Carl winced. No wonder they had not discovered so much as the flicker of a candle inside this house. No one was left alive to light a candle or do anything within these walls.

  With a heavy heart, Carl escorted the rest of his party through the open front door. Outside, Preston waited with Shyanne and the three boys they had brought along. “What happened?” Ricardo asked, “Why do you look sad?”

  “Don’t tell me,” Preston said.

  Carl’s eyes met Preston’s. “This is no home. It’s a cemetery.” Behind him, Lorenzo wrapped his arm around Alicia.

  “How many?” Preston asked.

  “Four. It was a family,” Carl replied.

  Carl plodded away from the house. Minutes ago he couldn’t wait to get inside. Now he couldn’t get away from here quick enough.

  He marched until he caught sight of Tara some distance away. She had stayed near the hill, at Carl’s request. He hurried to catch up to her.

  “The house?” Tara asked.

  Carl shook his head. “It’s a house of horrors. A whole family was killed. It…forget it. I can’t even go into it.” He shook his head. “It’s a good thing I asked you to stay out here with Michael. I think…” Carl looked back at the house. “Well, considering how he’s been, I don’t think he would have taken it very well.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Tara said with a sigh. “In fact, he might have had another episode.” She turned away. “I’ll stay with him until you all come back.”

  “That would be great,” Carl said.

  Carl allowed Tara to depart. Looking up, Carl spotted Michael sitting on the hill. In a way, Michael was both separated from the horrors of this world and consumed in them more deeply than Carl or any of his companions.

  As Carl returned his attention to the farmhouse, he started thinking about the events of the past few days. He pondered how they had got to this point, with these people in tow, and what this grisly discovery meant for their immediate, and perhaps distant future…

  Chapter Two

  Carl rose from his night’s sleep and instantly wished he hadn’t.

  “Ow!” Carl rubbed his back. He practically jumped from bed. His back protested quickly and viciously. Well, perhaps not viciously, but Carl’s body had a message to send. You’re not fully healed. Watch it!

  Carl almost wanted to shout back to his body, “Well, try taking on a psychopath in tight quarters and see how you feel.” But, he felt he had punished himself enough. After the ordeal he and his friends had gone through a few days ago, he ought to take it easy. The problems for Carl Mathers were that first, relaxing never came easy for him, and second, the world outside these walls would not allow it.

  He had slumbered all night on the floor in the main corridor of a large suburban mall. There were comfier places to take a nap. The department stores inside this mall had display beds, any one of which he could sleep on, but he refused. There were other people, children and women, who deserved those spots. Besides, Carl would not rest easy inside one of these mall stores. He wanted to be in or near the main artery of travel inside the mall. He felt he had to be ready at a moment’s notice to defend the refugees against possible invaders.

  Carl rose from the mat on the floor and began walking. A large barricade of furniture was pressed up against the mall’s main entrance of glass doors. He smiled at it. Perhaps there were bloodthirsty men out there, but they would not penetrate this haven so easily.

  A few people walked by, waving hi to him, wearing big smiles. Carl greeted them and even stopped to exchange a few words. Most of the survivors were still resting or recuperating from their ordeal, but more and more of them were feeling spry and wanting to walk around the mall. Carl and his friends were seen as heroes for their role in freeing them from Jason Maltesta’s captivity. Carl was happy to accept their well wishes, although he never felt comfortable receiving glory for his actions. Helping these people out and not leaving them at the mercy of Jason and his little gang of killers was the right and proper thing to do. He could not have done otherwise.

  As he left behind his latest round of well-wishers, he spotted the mall elevator close by. Naturally, it was shut down without any electricity to work it. Looking at it reminded Carl of the source of his injuries. While the elevator couldn’t take him upstairs, the escalator, though also shut down, provided a ready staircase to access the mall’s second floor balcony.

  He walked along the path that ran between the banister overlooking the first floor and a line of stores. He could have accessed Kelly’s Boutique from downstairs, but he wanted to take a stroll along the outside of the Kelly’s Boutique storefront. As he approached the opening, he took a look around. There were few signs of the struggle that had taken place here, except for the broken section of banister just a few yards from the opening of Kelly’s Boutique. Their foe Cyrus had taken a nasty spill through that section of the banister and met his end on the bottom floor.

  Otherwise, Kelly’s Boutique appeared to be just like any store that was under construction. When Carl and his friends first approached this store, they found a section covered with plastic tarps. Since then, the tarps had been removed, as well as the movable section of wall, allowing the se
cond floor finally to be exposed fully to the mall’s second floor corridor. Thus it was simple for Carl to step through the mall front and enter the store.

  Just a few days ago, this floor had been under construction, so it had been sealed off from the floor down below. The escalator was walled off, and it was doubtful anyone but construction workers were permitted up the elevator. But the world had changed in a big hurry when an electromagnetic pulse of unknown origin had burst high across the skies of the United States and likely the entire globe. The frying of the country’s power grids ensured the elevator car would remain stuck at the bottom floor. No one was coming up here via that route.

  So, people decided to go up through the car’s ceiling instead. When the first round of looting began in the mall, patrons caught in the crossfire fled to Kelly’s Boutique, where the mall security helped them hide up here by climbing through the elevator shaft. The hideaway served the survivors well until a man named Jason Maltesta arrived and discovered it. Carl and his friends had arrived in time to find Jason and his goon squad here, and sadly a guard named Palermo, who had been murdered at Jason’s hands. It was the intervention of Carl and his friends—and the bravery of a little girl—that drew Jason and his band of killers out of the store.

  It was a sign of the new normal around here that this floor was now mostly empty. Since the survivors no longer needed to hide, they scattered throughout the mall below, finding more comfortable places to reside. Carl couldn’t blame them. Without electricity, this place could get hot and stuffy, plus there were no working lights to provide illumination. In time, they would run out of flashlight batteries, which would make staying up here untenable.