Take Back Denver Read online

  Take Back Denver

  Part Two of the Denver Burning series

  by Algor X. Dennison

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2015 Algor X. Dennison

  This is Part Two of the Denver Burning series, in which McLean, Carrie, and their group fight back against the apocalypse that has overtaken Colorado. Read Part One first: Get Out of Denver.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 : New Arrival

  Chapter 2 : Reaching Out

  Chapter 3 : Taking Off

  Chapter 4 : Solo Journey

  Chapter 5 : Taking a Prisoner

  Chapter 6 : Taking in an Ally

  Chapter 7 : Turning Around

  Chapter 8 : Parting Ways

  Chapter 9 : Storm Clouds

  Chapter 10 : Gloves Off

  Chapter 11 : Dinner with a Guerrilla

  Chapter 12 : Prison Surveillance

  Chapter 13 : Coming to Blows

  Chapter 14 : Returning

  Chapter 15 : Proposals

  Chapter 16 : Back into the City

  Chapter 17 : Sowing Seeds

  Chapter 18 : War in Denver

  Chapter 19 : Walking Away

  Chapter 1 : New Arrival

  “EMP’s don’t take out cars,” Jim said, arguing with DJ and JD after lunch. “Cars aren’t big enough to conduct the energy. Not unless they’re electrics that are plugged in to the power grid when it goes off.”

  “Then what do you call that thing, whatever-it-was that took everything out?” JD countered. “What else could zap every car, every cell tower, every backup generator at once?”

  Jim just shook his head.

  “Seems like whoever it was that triggered it knew what they were doing,” DJ said. “Knew something the government didn’t about how to maximize an EMP’s impact on all targets.”

  “We may never know,” Jim admitted.

  DJ held up a finger. “Actually, I intend to find out. I may be a gimp at the moment, but there’s one thing I can still do just fine, and that’s gather intel. Somebody in this country knows what happened and who was behind it. Once you get the ham radio up and running, I’m going to start putting out feelers.”

  Carrie walked by with a basket full of laundry. “All right, gentlemen, back to work. I’m not scrubbing all these clothes by hand just so you can sit around pontificating.”

  “Slave-driver!” Jim muttered teasingly. He dodged a wet sock that Carrie threw, then sauntered out the door to continue his efforts on the radio antenna.

  “What’s pontificating?” JD asked, getting up to follow. “Is it like… you know, what you do in the outhouse?”

  “For some people, yeah,” Carrie replied, mouth splitting into a grin. “Now get going.”

  JD left scratching his head, and went up to the pasture to see how McLean was getting along with the irrigation project.

  They had been working hard for a week. Already they had doubled the garden in size, gotten a shelter built for the horses, and shifted the supplies in the basement around to make a few private sleeping nooks for those that didn’t fit in the upstairs bedrooms.

  They had quickly settled into a working routine, and were mainly just happy to be off the road and have a roof over their heads. It was an adjustment for some of them to share living quarters with so many others, but everyone was respectful and disciplined. McLean insisted they all get up at first light and work hard until after dark. Nobody complained, at least not seriously.

  Stephanie came running up the road shortly after lunch, waving her arms to get the attention of those working outside. She held up two fingers and gestured down the road. McLean and JD grabbed their rifles, always close to hand when working away from the house. After giving a shout to those inside to get ready, they ran to meet the teenaged girl.

  “Two people coming, about a mile from the Hendrickson’s place,” Stephanie said between gasps of breath. “A man and a woman. They look nice enough, but the man did have a handgun on his hip. They’re on foot, with backpacks.”

  McLean nodded. “Good work. Can you describe them? Age, hair color, build?”

  Stephanie patted the binoculars around her neck. “Sure. They both look Hispanic, dark hair and brown skin. The woman is pretty slim and has long hair. The man’s hair is graying. They look like they’re in their late forties.”

  JD looked at McLean. “Sounds like the Barros.”

  McLean agreed. “Sure does. You’re confident there’s no one else behind them, Steph?”

  “No one. I watched for another couple minutes to make sure, before I came back.”

  They sent Stephanie to the house to let everyone else know, and walked down to the gate they’d installed across the road, to wait for the newcomers to arrive.

  They could tell it was indeed their friends the moment they spotted the couple. Maria and Gordo Barros had joined the network late, but brought an immense skillset to the team. Maria was a doctor specializing in cardiology, and her husband was a radiologist. He had grown up on a farm and was integral to the group’s long-term agricultural aspirations, and she was to be the group’s physician.

  Maria waved a hand in greeting. When they got close, McLean opened the gate for them. “Welcome! We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “That was a very, very long walk,” Gordo said, breathing a long sigh and shaking hands with the men. “I didn’t think we were ever to get here.”

  Maria nodded wearily. “Gordo made us bush-whack through the forest most of the way. My pants are nearly shredded from all the branches and rocks.”

  “That was wise,” McLean told them. “We saw some terrible things on the roadways. You’d have needed an army to get through.”

  They went up to the ranchhouse where the pair were welcomed by everyone. After they’d had a drink and a sandwich, they told the tale of their journey.

  “We stayed at the hospital for a few days, trying to ease the strain and do what we could for the flood of victims coming in,” Maria explained. “Without power, though, Gordo couldn’t do any x-rays and my hands were tied when it came to anything more serious than a flesh wound. There were plenty of nurses for that. After the fourth day the number of patients dropped. We figured people were sheltering in their homes and venturing out less frequently by then.”

  “Yeah, I think most people finally realized that they’re on their own now,” Gordo added. “We turned away eighty percent of the people that came to the hospital because there just wasn’t anything we could do for them. We told many of them that they’d have to start solving their own problems with what they had on hand.”

  Maria took a drink and went on. “We returned home that night to find our house broken into and most of our equipment missing. We walked to the Baileys’ place to check on them and see if they had spare replacements for some of the things we’d lost,” she said, referring to another family that belonged to the group. “On the way we were forced to hide in an abandoned building to avoid a firefight that broke out on the street between two groups of thugs. When we finally got to the Baileys’, they were already gone. That’s when we decided if we were going to get out, that was our last chance.”

  “There were ragged military forces surrounding Denver on the west,” Gordo said. “They didn’t seem eager to enter the city, but they weren’t letting anything out of it. We managed to slip through at night during a change in the guard patrols. Once we got into the hills we had smooth sailing until we hit the Breckenridge resort area. We ran into some ugly customers there, thieves and bullies that have taken over some of the cabins in the area.”

  McLean nodded. “We had a run-in with a couple of them. Tried to steal our horses.”

  “Gordo had to face down a guy who pulled a knife
on us,” Maria said. “His pistol sent the man running for his life without needing to fire a shot, thank goodness. The final two days of the journey were hard going, but uneventful, since we stayed in the backcountry. I’m sure glad we practiced the route last summer. I don’t know if we’d have made it without recognizing landmarks from our backpacking trip through these mountains.”

  “Well, thank heaven you made it all right,” Jim said. “We need you here. But I wonder what happened to the Baileys?”

  “No idea,” Maria said. “We found no indication at their home of where they were headed. We assumed they’d be here.”

  “Maybe we should mount an expedition to find them,” DJ suggested.

  “Let’s give it another day or two,” McLean replied. “See if we can at least figure out a starting point. Maybe somebody on the radio will have seen them.”

  The others agreed, and spent several more minutes bringing Maria and Gordo up to speed and integrating them into their plans for the immediate future.

  As a doctor, Maria would manage everyone’s health and medical issues while Gordo took on some of the agricultural workload. That left Carrie without as much to do, although she gladly accepted Maria’s invitation to be her nursing staff. No one expected Carrie to cook and clean all day, and she wasn’t a stellar cook anyway. But she was still determined to make herself useful.

  The following evening McLean caught Carrie standing on the front porch, staring silently off into the distance. He went out to chat with her.

  “You can’t see Denver from here,” he said, sidling up next to her. “Even with binoculars.”

  Carrie sighed. “Right. I’m just thinking.”

  “It’s okay,” McLean said. “You left a lot behind there. Grieve all you need to.”

  “I’m not grieving,” Carrie retorted. “I didn’t lose anybody that was close to me. I just… I wonder what’s become of it all. And how we might have prevented it.” She sighed again and turned to face McLean. “I guess I’m just not ready to give up on the world.”

  McLean tapped a toe against the wooden porch pillar, looking out over the pasture and up to the mountains beyond.

  “Well, hold on to that,” he finally said, a note of resignation in his voice. “It may be important someday. I know it’s hard to shift your thinking so radically, and believe me, I didn’t ‘give up’ lightly. I had the optimism beaten out of me before I finally decided to prepare myself and let the ship sink as it wished. But I like to think that some day this old world will come around to its senses again. And if it does, I’ll be the first one to shake its hand and help it to its feet. Maybe you have a part to play in that recovery.”

  He swatted a horsefly away. “You should talk to DJ. Maybe the two of you can come up with a plan of action. Just see that it doesn’t interfere with our efforts here, or put us in harm’s way, okay? I owe it to the group we’ve formed not to let that happen.” Carrie nodded, and McLean drifted away to button up the stable and the front gate before turning in.

  As the evening breezes settled into the valley from the pine-crested peaks above, Carrie remained on the porch, thinking. There was a light in her eyes now that hadn’t been there since before the walls came tumbling down.

  Chapter 2 : Reaching Out

  “JD, you shouldn’t be up there without a rope or something,” Carrie warned. She was on the ground directing JD’s efforts to raise a new seventy-foot radio antenna. They were fastening it to the side of the house, convenient to the little radio nook off the kitchen. Soon it would be able to work in conjunction with a couple of smaller masts atop neighboring hills and ridges, to get optimal reception and broadcasting power. All of the antennas would soon be camouflaged with greenery.

  They had a working radio and had been trying for several days to raise someone-- anyone-- on it. But they’d heard nothing so far, except a few bursts of static that might have been someone transmitting but which quickly disappeared. The hope was that the new antennas would give them the power to reach out and talk to whoever was out there. They had to be cautious, however, as they didn’t want to betray their presence to malicious parties that might try to triangulate their location.

  “If I fall and get injured, will you gently nurse me back to health?” JD asked hopefully. The thought of a month in bed getting spoon-fed by Carrie sounded pretty nice to him.

  “Nope. Maria might.”

  JD made a face and scrambled up the pitch of the roof to wrap a tie around the antenna and bolt it to the house. “No deal. Maria’s a nice lady, but I kind of liked it when you were the doctor. I was planning to strain my back so you’d have to massage it for me. But then the Barros’ showed up.”

  Carrie shook her head in disbelief. “I never was a doctor. And you’re out of your mind, JD.”

  The golden-bearded man on the roof finished what he was doing and stood up, straddling the house’s peak. He dramatically wiped his brow. “Whew, this sun is hot.” In one smooth motion he whipped off his shirt and stretched his muscles.

  Carrie averted her eyes. “Are you done up there?”

  JD grabbed the radio mast for support, leaned off the roof, then swung down and hung from the edge of the roof. Carrie stifled a scream and just watched as JD put one foot out to a rung of the antenna and his other against the side of the house. Leaping to the ground from a height of ten feet or so, he bent his knees and landed deftly. Then he stood to face Carrie, shirt in hand. “Yeah, I’m done. Anything else you need me to do for you… honey?”

  Carrie backed away, speechless and torn between outrage and laughter. She bumped right into McLean coming around the corner of the house. He stopped in his tracks, bracing Carrie by the shoulders to keep her from tripping over him, and stared at JD.

  JD wheeled away, yanking his shirt back over his head. “Come on, McLean! You have the worst timing, you know that?”

  “You are utterly outrageous, JD. Did you know that?” McLean shot back. “Here we are at the end of the world, with more work than we can get done in a day, and you just can’t keep your clothes on around this girl! It’s unbelievable.”

  JD sauntered off to resume his efforts prepping for an extension of the house. Carrie, red in the face and giggling uncontrollably now, fled into the kitchen to avoid McLean’s gaze. He stood alone, looking up at the new radio antenna, and shook his head. “Why do I feel like the grouchy dad around here?” he asked himself, then headed off toward the Hendricksons’ place to help Gavin put up some new fencing.

  Inside the house, Carrie found DJ messing with some cables. “The antenna’s up,” she said. “Let’s connect the radio and see if we can get anything now.”

  “Okay,” he said, getting to his feet and hobbling to the kitchen with one crutch. “Can you feed the wire in through that hole we drilled?”

  “Already did,” Carrie replied. Together they connected the radio to the new antenna, and scanned through the frequencies they’d heard noise on earlier.

  After ten minutes, DJ gave up. “We’ve got to get those additional antennas up on the ridges,” he said. “We’re just not getting out of this valley. I wish Darren were here. He’s our real comms expert. I’m just going off of what I learned from him, and from the internet back when it still existed. I got my ham license, but I don’t know a ton about how to track down other people that aren’t readily showing up on the freqs we expect.” He sat back and whacked the wall with his crutch in frustration. “It worked when I was up here a couple years ago, but I guess conditions have changed. Or else...”

  Carrie looked at him. “Or else what?”

  “Or, nobody’s out there to answer. Nobody with a working radio for a thousand miles.”

  “That’s impossible. There has to be somebody. You told me there were hundreds of thousands of ham radio guys.”

  “Yeah. There were.”

  “I’m going to keep trying. There has to be somebody that had their equipment protected besides us.”

  DJ left her to it and went back to his
cabling, preparing the other antennas that would boost their reach.

  On top of the radio project, Carrie had been spending her free time exploring the area with Stephanie, scouting the mountains and neighboring valleys for signs of other people and animals. They had been on several long walks together, which had the benefits of turning them into good friends and learning the terrain around their ranch.

  The deer population seemed healthy enough, and there were plenty of fish in the streams and lakes. They had enjoyed a meal the previous night of fresh-caught trout. A bear or cougar had wandered down to investigate the horses until Gordo went out and scared it off.

  There were a few neighbors within a day’s walk besides the Hendricksons. One was a bit of a mountain man himself and had a trap line up a nearby creek. Another had been a pastor before retiring to his cabin with his elderly wife, and when they spoke with him he expressed an interest in getting a small group together on Sundays for worship services. Another couple lived with their teenage son and daughter ten miles away. Stephanie was glad to know she wasn’t the only youngster in the region.

  Today she had gone on a “scout patrol” by herself, since Carrie was working on the radio. When she returned just before dinner, she was hanging onto the back of a dune buggy, driven by two men.

  The others heard the noise of an engine coming several minutes before it arrived. McLean, JD, and Gordo took up rifle positions while the others secured the house. Through his binoculars, McLean identified the drivers of the dune buggy, and told the others to stand down. Stephanie was bringing two more members of their group, Ron Hodges and Brad Edersheim.

  The dune buggy pulled up in front of the house in a cloud of dust, and Ron killed its engine. It was a large, rugged contraption with roll bars over the top and a pile of cargo strapped to the rear. Stephanie leaped off and danced around, thrilled to have found a vehicle that still ran. Her father had been tinkering with McLean’s tractor, but needed replacement parts to get it going.