Canada Under Attack: Where Shadows Walk

Part 8

Which brings me right back to where I started, staring at my shaking hands and willing my heart to slow down as I tried to digest what I had just experienced.

I made the river valley just barely ahead of the anarchists, tossing my pack down ahead of me into the coulee before parkouring down the path to throw off pursuit as I followed it down the hill. Now I stood with my chest heaving and my hands shaking as my mind chaotically churned and fear sent adrenaline running like quicksilver through my veins.

I was frozen. I literally didn't know what to do next. The visitors had twisted my world into a broken shell of what it once was, devastating her cities and her people until only those that walked where shadows walked still remained. Now even those shadows weren't safe with alien hunters spitting silent death from every vantage point and mind-broken anarchists raiding and pillaging the handful of survivors that had withstood the first three waves of attack.

My family had been brutally taken from me. With their deaths my only hope of survival was destroyed. How was I supposed to do this by myself?

Hearing several shots being fired from the ridge stirred me from my dark reverie. Carefully I leaned out from behind my cover to look up the hill. What was going on up there?

Without warning a hand was slipping over my mouth. Then, before I could react, I was pulled back behind cover.

"Shhhh!" Tasha hissed tautly into my ear as she threw her arm around me and pulled me tightly to her. "Stay absolutely still. There's like three hunters up there and the anarchists are trying to fight them off."

Despite that, I found myself struggling against her desperately strong hold. When she finally dropped her hand off my face to maintain her grip on me, I hissed:

"You knew the anarchists were going to attack my family, didn't you," I accused in a hard whisper. "It's your fricking uncle leading them! That's why you didn't want me to go back to the house. You knew they'd be there."

"Yes." Her answer was curt and oddly truthful.

"Then why didn't you do something to help them? Warn them or something? Or come with me when I went back?"

"I didn't know you weren't with them until I saw you this morning," she quietly confessed. "When I overheard my uncle planning the attack, I immediately left camp in the hopes of reaching the city before they did so I could warn you guys. But I was on foot, and they had quads they had protected from the EMP. By the time I got here, they were already moving in on your house. I was too late to save your mom, dad and brother. But then I saw you a couple blocks away and knew I could at least save you."

"The anarchists killed them, Tasha," I groaned, my strength leaving me in a rush. I sagged back against her. "They killed my family. Cam as he defended the back gate. And Mom and Dad when Dad refused to give up the location of his cache. Your uncle shot my parents. He shot them right in the head. I saw it all."

The tears came hot and bitter as the full weight of my loss slammed into me.

"Oh man," I quietly sobbed. "What, ... what am I going to do?"

Tasha's arms went from restraining to hugging.

"It's the same question I asked after my dad died," she said, her voice sympathetic as she whispered in my ear. "He wasn't quite right when he quit the armed forces after Afghanistan. But he was there for me when Mom died from cancer, the only person that gave a damn about what happened to me. When I lost him to the plague and my uncle went crazy, I didn't have any family left either. All I had were my prepper friends. When my uncle convinced them to join his anarchists, I lost them, too."