Charlie's Requiem: Resistance Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  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 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHARLIE’S REQUIEM: RESISTANCE

  BOOK 3

  A. AMERICAN AND WALT BROWNING

  Charlie’s Requiem: Resistance

  Copyright © 2017 by A. American and Walt Browning All rights reserved.

  First Edition: November 2017

  http://www.waltbrowning.com

  [email protected]

  http://www.angeryamerican.com

  Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  PREFACE

  THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPENED. WHILE CHARLIE, a pharmaceutical sales representative, was visiting her favorite physician’s office just a mile from Universal Studios, an EMP struck the nation. Without electricity, computers, or even modern automobiles, the city of Orlando rapidly deteriorated into chaos.

  After surviving the first week, Charlie left Dr. Kramer’s office behind to try to find safety outside the city. Travelling with Janice, a nurse, and local college student Garrett, they were set upon by a white supremacist gang that had struck a deal with the country’s new leadership.

  A new brand of fascism is taking hold, driven by a remarkably well-organized Department of Homeland Security. DHS is using prisoners and criminals to scare the population into reporting to government camps. There, undesirables such as constitutionalists and the helplessly disabled are rounded up…and never seen again.

  While Charlie and her friends fight their way through the urban nightmare, Dr. Kramer has returned to his home in the Central Florida countryside. His family has fared well, thanks to their hurricane preparedness, though he fears for his daughter Claire, who is stranded in Nashville at Vanderbilt University. Their neighbors have taken care of each other, and their suffering has been minimal. But Dr. Kramer has seen the horror of the government’s new agenda, as the elderly and chronically disabled mysteriously disappear. Following the buses bound for the nearby camp, Kramer discovers the terrible truth. The camp is not for interment but extermination.

  Former police officers John, Beth and Big Mike joined DHS and are now an integral part of the corrupt regime. Their personal ethics have turned them against their new government masters, as they too discover the nefarious powers that are controlling the reins of power.

  Charlie and her friends made their way to her father’s abandoned home outside Orlando to regroup. They were saved by a young investment banker named Jorge and his girlfriend, Maria, who herself was rescued from a DHS camp. Along the way, they picked up an abused young man named Beker.

  They have survived, so far, with minimal survival skills. And now they are getting ready to push through the rest of Orlando, having fought and killed to gain every inch of ground. This terrifying new world has placed each of them in situations they could never have imagined. Every step they take will put them in mortal danger and every decision they make could be their last.

  Charlie’s Requiem: Resistance shows the inhumanity of man and the forces that make people rise to the occasion, or sink into depravity. Our military men and women who swore an oath to fight all enemies, foreign and domestic, can be used in nefarious ways. And Charlie has to find a way through all that, while keeping her life and soul alive.

  CHAPTER 1

  MAITLAND, FL

  MID-WINTER

  “In ourselves our safety must be sought.

  By our own right hand, it must be wrought.”

  — William Wordsworth

  A BULLET EXPLODED THE WOOD FRAME of the door beside Jorge’s head. Cursing, he jumped through the front door of the abandoned home and dove for the floor.

  “I can’t see where it’s coming from!” he yelled to me.

  I stayed quiet, not wanting to give my position away. I was squatting behind a knee wall that jutted from the side of the home we had just broken into. Just in front of the wall, a cluster of camellia bushes, heavy with dark red blooms, anchored the corner of the front garden bed. The wall, more decorative than functional, was little more than a single layer of concrete blocks slathered with stucco. The high-speed bullets from a battle rifle, traveling around three thousand feet per second, would make short work of both the wall and me if the shooter found where I had hidden.

  I had approached this corner of the home from the rear of the house, having circled through the back yard in a vain attempt to gain access to the structure through a side or back door. I had heard Jorge pounding on the front door as I snuck through the back yard, announcing our intention to break in. I thought that defeated the purpose, but he wanted to make sure no one was inside. I didn’t argue since his incessant knocking would draw any potential occupant to the front of the home, minimizing the chances that I would be noticed.

  CRACK…CRACK!

  Two more rounds hit the door frame in an attempt to end my friend’s life.

  I belly-crawled to the corner of the wall, peeking around its edge. The bushes were flanked by foot-high society garlic ground cover, which prevented me from seeing anything other than the rooftops of the houses across the road. The street to my left was empty, and I risked crawling into the bushes. A scan to the right showed no people in that direction.

  The gunfire seemed like it was coming from across the street, but with the homes tightly packed together, the sound of the rifle echoed. The shots could be coming from anywhere. Each house had a driveway that went straight up to a double car garage. The homes, built less than 30 years ago, all sat within a 50 feet of the street. Mature oak trees, towering nearly a hundred feet high, were planted between the sidewalk and road. Several driveways had abandoned cars or SUVs snuggled up to their closed garage doors. I stayed still, searching for the most likely place the shooter could have set themselves up.

  I brought my AR-15 up to a prone shooting position and scanned the scene in front of me through my red dot sight. I once again wished I had a magnified scope to look through. My Aimpoint red dot was delightfully light, which was why I chose it. But having magnified scope right now would have been wonderful, and I vowed to change my optics as soon as I found one worth the additional weight I would have to lug around.

  CRACK!

  There! One house to the right and across the street. The garage door had been lifted about two feet off the ground, and the flash of gunfire briefly illuminated the dark interio
r.

  “Stop!” Jorge yelled from inside the house. “Stop shooting!”

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  Round after round poured into the home, the flimsy wood frame and stucco construction doing little to stop the bullets. I could hear Jorge scrambling to the back of the house. Then came the thud of the rear glass door slamming. I hoped he’d made it into the back yard.

  The shooting from across the street stopped. I estimated they’d fired about thirty rounds.

  I kept watch for movement from within the darkened garage while Jorge crawled up behind me. His heavy breathing began to slow as his adrenalin dump subsided. Being on the receiving end of close to a full magazine would make anyone jumpy.

  “You alright?” I whispered, keeping my eyes on the enemy’s position.

  “Shit,” he gasped. “That was intense.”

  “I guess they didn’t get the memo,” I remarked drily. We’d gone to all the trouble of leaving a note at the neighboring houses, stating our intent to search for food and supplies, but apparently the shooter didn’t read it or didn’t care.

  My group had made our way to my father’s house after abandoning downtown Orlando. My father, an avid sportsman, had a nice stash of gear for us, including a few rifles and handguns. More importantly, this was home for me. Although I didn’t live here after my parents divorced, I had spent many weekends with him and his second wife before I left for college. Even though it had been over ten years since I’d slept under this roof, I drew comfort from the familiarity of the house. I nearly cried when I saw the same bedspread and pillows I used back then. I guess I needed some normalcy more than I had thought. That night, I felt good for the first time since the lights went off.

  That was almost four weeks ago. Since then, we had organized ourselves and canvassed the neighborhood.

  My dad lived on the middle street of three identical circular roads, which looped around and reconnected to the common north/south street that ended at the lake. He lived on the “inside” of the circle, with the “outer” homes backing up to a similar cluster of homes to the north and south. The three circular street neighborhood was as isolated as you could find. The southern street ended on Lake Maitland, while the other two circular streets to the north were guarded by eight-foot-high block walls to the east and north, effectively creating an isolated nest. A decent situation given that we were still in the middle of one of the most densely populated parts of Central Florida.

  A few days after arriving, we began to venture out, making contact with anyone that hadn’t left. With three similar circular roads making up our new area of operation, and my father’s place on the middle of the three circular streets, it wasn’t long before we had surveyed our surroundings and we found only two houses still occupied. The first was around the bend from my dad’s place. The owners, both retired, were at the end of their ability to survive here on their own. The day after we showed up, we saw them walking up to the main road. They had finally given up and put their lives in the hands of the new government.

  The other house that we had found occupied was owned by a young couple, Harley and Ashley Riker. They didn’t see any need to leave their house for the unknown future of a government camp, especially after they heard our story. With a backyard pool and plenty of propane tanks salvaged from neighbors, they were able to boil water and cook meals. We agreed to cooperate while we were in the neighborhood, but otherwise our group left the couple alone.

  We were, essentially, on our own.

  With the detailed maps provided by DHS agent John Drosky, we planned our burglaries before venturing out. About two weeks ago, we wrote a note for each home and taped them on every front door in the surrounding neighborhoods, telling any stragglers that we planned on scavenging for supplies. We had hoped to prevent the type of attack we had just survived. The note stated that we were looking for food, assuring any homeowner that we would respect their property and would leave them alone. We wanted to head off any confrontations like the one we had just experienced. Thus, my sarcastic remark about the homeowner “not getting the memo.”

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Best way to survive a gunfight is to run away.”

  “Or not get into one to begin with,” I added.

  Jorge grunted in agreement as we darted behind the house and approached the wooden stockade fence. Our backpacks were nearly full of salvaged items, and they went over the barrier first.

  We limited ourselves to gathering calorie dense food so the packs were heavy, but I was still a little disappointed with our haul. Packages of trail mix and canned meats were high on our list, but surprisingly few places were stocked with such things. Most pantries offered canned vegetables, soups, and a ton of pre-packaged coffee pods. I didn’t want to carry any item that didn’t give me a full meal’s worth of calories. Dried or dehydrated was best, although I do have to admit that I made room for hot chocolate packages. Sometimes, chocolate is the only thing that helps.

  We scaled the fence, and a few minutes later we were back to my dad’s house. I sighed as we deposited our loot onto the growing pile of goods we had salvaged. Spam, instant rice, pasta, nuts, peanut butter, and trail mix were calorie-dense foods, but they didn’t make for particularly delicious meals.

  One of the things we’d really been looking for was Crisco shortening, and we’d struck yellow gold—or lard—on a previous trip. A few days after the EMP struck, Harley had taken the meat out of his garage freezer before it spoiled and made jerky. Over two hundred pounds of venison and beef had been stripped and dehydrated in his Magic Elite 50 outdoor grill.

  We ground up the dried meat and combined it with Crisco in a two-to-one ratio by volume to make pemmican. In some of the batches, we added a couple of extra items to add variety. A tablespoon of honey along with dried fruits like raisins, dates or dried apples were added in an equal volume to the fat. The taste was divine, but Harley warned us that the shelf-life of these pemmican balls were a year or less, while the pulverized meat and fat balls could last years.

  I didn’t care about shelf-life since we had less than fifty miles to travel. I went with the ones with the fruit.

  When we were done, we had over a hundred Ziploc bags full of pemmican in addition to our other calorie-dense food supplies. Now we just needed a way to filter water for the trip. We still hadn’t run across any water purifying straws or camping filtration systems since we’d started our search, and I was starting to get anxious.

  “You guys alright?” Harley Riker asked as he joined us.

  His wife, who had been boiling water outside, followed a few moments later. “We heard gunfire,” Ashley said.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Jorge replied. “We were over in the King’s Row neighborhood and ran into a little trouble.”

  “More than a little,” I added. “I think some idiot did a magazine dump on us.”

  “Which house was it?” Harley asked. “Me and Ashley ran into a guy on the south loop of the neighborhood while we were scrounging for propane. The way that guy was talking to us, he sounded like some kind of loner. What was weird,” Riker continued, after he’d finished stacking some of the canned soups in a cluster on the floor, “was that his garage was lined with old newspapers and phone books, all stacked up against the walls, and even across the door opening.”

  “Was it the faded yellow one-story with the dirt front yard?” Jorge asked.

  “Yeah,” Harley said. “That’s him. He’s been a problem for his neighbors for quite a while. Never kept up the yard and always had the HOA on his back about it. They claimed his house was lowering the property values. You know the type.”

  “Well, I don’t think we need to bother him anymore,” I said. “We have enough to get out of the city.”

  “Have you decided where to go?”

  “Not yet,” I replied. “Jorge and Maria are definitely heading to his brother’s ranch. I don’t know if I want to join them, but I really don’t see any other viable option
.”

  “Still thinking of getting to Dr. Kramer’s place?” Ashley asked.

  “Janice and I would like to go there,” I replied. “But we don’t know if he can handle the extra mouths to feed.”

  About a week after the EMP had darkened the nation, Jorge’s entire family had left their south Orlando home and walked to one of the state’s largest cattle ranches. Located about sixty miles south of the city, it covered nearly half of the east/west length of the state and was home to thousands of heads of Brahman and Angus cattle. Jorge’s brother was employed there and assured his family that they would all be welcome and needed when they arrived.

  “Pretty sure my brother has the resources to take us in” Jorge said. “They’re hunkered down on a huge cattle ranch, and they could use more people to guard the property. You two should think about joining us.”

  ***

  “I wish we could talk to John,” Janice absently stated as she began to break down our backpacks and separate our supplies from the stuff we would be leaving behind with Harley and Ashley. “I would love to find out what’s going on out there.”

  “Yeah, well I wish for a lot of stuff too,” I replied.

  I stripped off my battle belt and dropped it onto the kitchen counter. I’d taken it from my dad’s gun closet, and I had to say it was a nice addition to my gear. It was a simple 5-11 tan nylon belt with an adjustable buckle. It has three magazine pouches attached to the left side, an IFAK on the right back hip, and a tan dump pouch hooked to it at the small of my back. I also took a single-point sling from his stash, which I used to carry my rifle. It let me use both hands as the AR hung on my right side. During those long days of scavenging, it had saved my back and shoulders from untold wear and tear.

  I also had my dad’s Glock 19 in an outside waistband paddle holster. It never left my side, even staying under my pillow when I crashed for the night. The Glock had upgraded ghost ring night sights and an extended magazine and slide release. My father called it his “Frankenpistol.” He thought of himself as a regular gunsmith because he bought and installed most of the parts himself. I later found out he had a professional put in the 4.5-pound trigger, but I never let on that I knew that little fact. Despite the extras, it was nearly half a pound lighter than my Hi Point 9 mm, had double the magazine capacity, and a far better trigger. I will always fondly remember the strength and security the Hi Point gave me those first weeks after the lights went out, but there was no doubt that I was going to be running the Glock from this point forward.