"Before the Tribulation driving up Highway 5 from Grants Pass to Roseburg was about an hour's drive. Good road, rest stops, a little windy, a lot of up and down. Now it was an obstacle course. Cars abandoned or crashed into each other. Road trains mangled and blocking the road across all the lanes. Human remains in many of the vehicles. It was a nightmare. If we weren't fleeing from the nightmare in Grants Pass it would have dissuaded us from our trek, but we knew that there was no reprieve behind us. It took us about 10 hours to go 68 miles. It was dark by the time we got to Roseburg. I think it was late May, so that had to be after 9. We couldn't see much. Naturally, there were no city lights. We found an abandoned church and slept inside, feeling somehow safer in a House of God."
"Just before dawn we were woken by a gunshot as one of our sentries died near a smashed window. We all grabbed rifles and took positions where we could shoot back. There were about 40 men outside. They were in worse shape than we were. I could see signs of radiation poisoning in several of them (I recognized it because I had seen a lot of it first hand very recently). They all looked starving and desperate. We started shooting back and my focus just became what was in front of me. Fire, duck, shoot again, look out for the guy sneaking behind the shed over there, shoot again, pull the trigger and curse because the magazine is empty. Reload, shoot again. I don't know how long the fire-fight lasted. It might have been 10 minutes. It might have been an hour. It felt like days. Eventually they ran away, realizing we had numbers and fire-power, I guess. I know that two bullets I fired killed men I didn't know. I know that two of my friends were dead and several more were wounded. The women patched them up as well as they could. We took a look outside. Fred took a team on the west side of the church, I took a team on the east side. I heard one gunshot from the west and we went running. Fred said that one of the attackers was still alive and tried to shoot him, so he killed him. The other boys with him looked pretty scared, of Fred. They didn't say anything, but I got the idea that Fred didn't wait for the guy to pick up a gun."
Mother Rainbow's Children: The Cave
No comments:
Post a Comment