They simply could not trust any law enforcement given what had just happened and given that they were armed and weapons were being confiscated; being stopped, questioned and searched would not go well for them.
Jack and Caitlin agreed that their best plan would be to go to Bill and Cindy’s farm, if not to stay with them at least as a goal to get out of town and see them on their way. They knew that the great danger of bugging out without anywhere to go was that they could end up as refugees. They did have supplies, so long as they could keep them out of other people’s hands, but without a solid base anywhere they went would be tenuous.
In fact, that first afternoon they didn’t go anywhere far. They drove to one of the outdoor swimming pools that the HOA ran in their neighborhood, open only during the summer months. This particular pool was a couple of miles away and down a secluded lane, without having to leave the network of suburban back roads.
Jack cut the padlock on the gate and, once they had driven through, replaced it with a spare. He had collected breaking tools for just such a purpose. They drove into cover at the back of the pool buildings and got the cars into the trees. Jack figured that if law enforcement worked out what had happened at the house, and that the family had bugged out, it would be easy to catch them in a net of roadblocks.
They set up the tent in the woods and still had plenty of propane to cook with before they would have to use an open fire or the rocket stove. For the kids, it was another camping trip. They even got to watch a movie on the DVD in the Suburban. Caitlin concentrated on the kids while Jack and Andrew took turns with a roving watch throughout the night, accompanied by Jasper. The only thing the kids missed from their normal camping trips was an open fire.
Later that evening, when the rush was over and Sarah and Connor had gone to sleep, it was the quiet time. Jack noticed Andrew pacing nervously and he walked over to him, placing his hand on his shoulder and squeezing it reassuringly. Andrew looked at him and started to shake, and then he began to sob uncontrollably as the adrenaline come-down from the day’s events began to take over. He hadn’t stopped to think since the battle and the rush to evacuate, with the possibility of being chased or found. Now, he had time to reflect.
Jack pulled him into his chest and held him, “Its ok son, you did great, you didn’t freeze, you did real good, I’m proud of you.”
Caitlin came over and hugged them both, tears running down her face. She took Andrew and sat with him cradled in her lap as she comforted him, his soft sobbing more under control now. She gazed down at him under the fall of her blonde hair, just as she had when he was a baby. Jack took the watch.
How had it come to this?
The next morning they were up and packing at dawn. Jack had worked out a route solely along minor back roads. I was a little circuitous and he thought they had about fifty miles to go. They had battle cleaned all the weapons during the night, one firearm at a time, and reloaded all the magazines. They wore their battle belts and Jack wore his tactical vest; they wore civilian clothes, jeans and outdoor boots, and had not yet put on the tactical and camouflage clothing that they had for the backwoods.
Jack had a light jacket and put it on over his vest, so that at first glance in his car he would not appear to be kitted out. They all wore their handguns holstered on their battle belts and the rifles and shotguns were kept down resting by their legs so they were accessible but out of view. The idea was to move slowly so that they would not run into anything by surprise around a bend.
For this reason, and also so that they could get the kids out quickly if they had to, they did not use the child seats for Connor and Sarah.
They had a couple of two way ‘walkie-talkie’ VHF radios that they kept in the cars, recharging in mounts plugged into the 12 volt cigarette lighter socket. Jack wanted to stay off the radio as much as possible. In case something happened and he did not have time to grab and talk on the radio they arranged that he would use the hazard lights and/or the horn to indicate any trouble ahead.
Caitlin would stay a tactical bound behind and if Jack stopped she would reverse out to a safe spot, turn around, and wait for him to reverse out. If his vehicle was immobilized for any reason he would fight back on foot, with cover fire support from Andrew if possible.
The idea of going slowly was so as to not be taken by surprise and therefore they would hopefully be able to stop short of any trouble, reverse back, turn around and drive away. Jack did not want to be ramming or attempting to drive through any ambush or road blocks: not only did this have the potential to be a catastrophic fail, but it would force Caitlin to follow through after him, unless they were to get split up, and this would put the kids in danger.
The vehicles were not armored in any way and high velocity rounds would pass through them like a knife through butter. The only effective protection to be had from the vehicles was from the engine block and the metal parts of the wheels. The tires on the cars were also standard, not ‘run-flats’ and thus could be easily punctured, thus immobilizing the cars.
The drill for if they got stopped, maybe as a result of their vehicles being immobilized or trapped under enemy fire, was to get out into cover on the opposite sides of the vehicles from where the fire was coming from. They would return fire and then use fire and the cover provided by the ground to move out of the enemy kill zone and escape. Caitlin would run close protection on the young kids, while Jack and Andrew provided covering fire and ‘leap-frogged’ out of the kill zone by bounds, working as a buddy pair.
The route they had chosen avoided obvious main thoroughfares and kept to the smaller back roads, sometimes going in the wrong direction in order to get to a junction to take a minor road heading the right way. They got into the countryside south of Manassas.
Whenever they drove over a junction with a main road they saw evidence of the panic and the evacuation from the cities. Gas stations had run dry and were closed and many vehicles were abandoned by the side of, or even on, the road. Down the back roads there was less evidence of this, but there was still a trail of abandoned vehicles.
Occasionally they drove past parking areas that had become impromptu refugee camps, tents or tarps set up back in the woods or people simply living in their cars. They did not get much interest from the hopeless eyes of many of these starving beaten people.
Sometimes they saw evidence of violence, abandoned and occasionally burned out cars, bodies laid by the side of the road surrounded by the detritus of their looted possessions. They passed some groups of exhausted refugees, shambling along carrying their meager possessions, often pushing children in strollers also loaded up with what they could carry from their homes.
It seemed that, a month after the power had gone out, much of the violence had already happened; leaving the survivors starving, hopeless and exhausted, prey to gangs.
They were passing through a mix of open fields and forested areas, typical of Northern Virginia, when they entered a wooded area where the road started winding a little more. Jack came around a right hand bend at about twenty five miles an hour and saw the roadblock ahead, about one hundred meters distance.
It looked like two military armored Humvees, parked on each side of the road, staggered, so as to force vehicles to slow down; the turret mounted machine-guns facing opposite directions up and down the road. There were a couple of uniformed soldiers standing around.
Jack stepped on the brakes and put the car into reverse, as he did so he saw the guard in the road shout, raising his weapon. The turret gunner popped his head up behind the armored glass shield and trained his weapon on Jack’s car. The troops at the roadblock opened fire.