Home Coming (The Survivalist Book 10) A. American (read after .txt) 📖

it was always over there. Never was it here. Never had any American town been exposed to destruction on this level, not since the Civil War.

The troops at the barricade were awestruck. None of the rockets made their way this far. They were concentrated on the Eustis area. Notoriously inaccurate, it was just a roll of the dice that none of them found their way this far north. We stopped and talked with the wide-eyed soldiers.

“Anyone been into town yet?” Sarge asked.

The Guardsmen shook their heads. “No. We’ve been taking cover in the culvert. I’ve never seen anything like it. No one can be alive in there,” he said, looking into town.

Sarge looked down the road. A thick column of dense black smoke was climbing high into the sky from the burning diesel fuel of the bladder located beside the armory. “It ain’t going to be pretty, but we need to go in there.”

He told the Guardsmen to stay at the barricade and we made our way into the inferno that was Eustis. The Grad rockets were not what you’d call a precision munition. I don’t know what the failure rate is, but we had to maneuver around an unexploded rocket, its fins protruding out of the asphalt in the middle of Bay Street.

When the armory came into view, my heart sank. The building was utterly destroyed and a flaming pyre. Several bodies lay in the street in front of what was left of the building. And upon closer inspection, there were more bodies and, more disturbingly, pieces of bodies everywhere. Some were charred corpses. Reminiscent of the figures left after the eruption of Pompei. But these were still smoking. Their lips, if they had any, were curled back in a sneer, revealing their teeth. It was impossible to discern man from woman. They were simply ghastly, charred apparitions of people, like three dimensional shadows.

The fires were so intense it was difficult to get close to several places. The police department was no longer there. A vague outline of the building was still on the ground, but nothing more than two feet tall protruded above the surface. The county administration building, our courthouse, was also ablaze. I worried for Mitch and Michelle.

Every structure in town was either damaged or destroyed. The roads were blasted and cratered. It wasn’t the Eustis I knew. We drove over to the clinic. The military grade tents that housed our only medical service were no longer there. Tattered pieces of canvas and shattered medical equipment littered the ground. The first recognizable body I found was a man in medical scrubs. He was lying in the road, not far from the clinic. He was very clearly dead, but I saw no obvious injuries.

But there were survivors. They appeared out of the flaming and charred ruins of the town. Always in shock, sometimes injured, sometimes not. Some were naked, their clothes either blasted or burned off. We began collecting the wounded in the park. It was a large open area where nothing was burning, though rockets had also fallen there. There were craters blasted into the lawn. The bandshell had taken a hit too, blasting away more than half of the dome. But, it was the best we could do at the time.

I was knelt down beside a woman. She’d caught a blast on her left side and been horribly injured. Though her left side was blackened from the explosion and there were terrible wounds covering her entire left side, she was still conscious. Her left leg was missing just above the knee and I fumbled with my tourniquet to get it out. She tried to speak, but a large hole in her cheek prevented her from forming anything intelligible. She was hard to look at.

I couldn’t say anything to her. What could I say? You’re going to be alright? I knew better than that. There was no way we could save her. Feeling a hand on my shoulder, I looked back to see Doc standing over me; and he shook his head. I looked back to the woman and said, “We can’t just leave her like this.”

“There’s nothing we can do for her. We don’t have the resources to help her.”

“But, we can’t just let her suffer.”

“We’re going to have to make some very hard decisions.” It was Sarge. He’d walked up as Doc and I talked.

“Like what?” I asked.

The old man looked around the burning town, then said, “We don’t have the resources to save most of these people. So, we either let them suffer until they die, or put ‘em out of their misery.”

“You mean shoot them?” I asked. And I looked at Doc, expecting him to argue the point.

But he didn’t. “It’s the humane thing to do. As much as I hate the thought of it. We can’t help them and they’re suffering terribly. It would be best to stop the suffering as quick as we can.”

I looked at the woman. It didn’t appear she was registering what we were talking about. It also didn’t appear she was completely conscious. I looked closely at her now. With the missing leg, she was also missing most of the fingers on her left hand. The left side of her face was horribly disfigured with most of her cheek blasted away, so I could see into her mouth where several teeth were also missing. Even if we could save her, what sort of life would she possibly have? Reconstructive surgery was out of the question. There was no way to get her a prosthetic leg. It was a simple fact that modern medicine as we’d all come to know it, no longer existed.

I slowly rose to my feet and looked at Doc, “You sure there’s nothing we can do?”

He looked at her and shook his head. “Not for her. There are others we can save, but anyone wounded this severely, no. There’s no saving her.”

As Doc spoke a pistol shot rang out down the street. I