Chapter Two

 

 

 

 

Tessa Holden braced her feet apart and lifted the weapon, her finger on the trigger as she attempted to line up the target. She let out a breath and pulled the trigger, feeling the kick of the gun as she looked to see where her shot hit. Damn, she’d missed again.

“Damn it, Tessa. Why can’t you seem to get the hang of this, girl? You’re the only one who can’t seem to shoot worth a damn,” her Uncle Dale cried as she closed her eyes and wished she was anywhere but here.

“Aw, leave the girl alone, Dale. She’s just a little prissier than her sisters. She’ll get it eventually as she did with the other weapons,” Grant, her other uncle, grumbled.

Tessa glanced at them where they both sat behind her on the little concrete wall that lined the yard. She wanted to get this over with as fast as possible and the way to do that was to learn to shoot the AK-47 she was holding with dead-on accuracy. It was a skill she would likely never need. Rolling her eyes as she aimed again, she was glad her ears were covered with the sound mufflers when her two uncles began to argue, again. They’d been doing it for most of the two-hour lesson and she didn’t see an end to it any time soon. She really wished that her family was normal. It would have been great if they could have been, but they weren’t.

Letting out another steadying breath, she pulled the trigger again hearing the rat-tat-tat of the bullets as they pinged the target. This time she was closer but they were still off by about three inches and until she could line it up with the heart every time she shot for at least three targets, they weren’t going to let her go back to reading her book and she damned well knew it. The fact that the target was on a conveyor belt that moved every few seconds didn’t help her aim.

Tessa felt a little bit of sweat trickle down her chest between her breasts and she wanted to wipe it but she didn’t want to lower the gun. Her uncles would decide she needed instruction again and start in with all the tips. They’d come over to ‘help’ her with the shot and she’d end up being here for another three hours.

Why her family thought that she would ever need to shoot at a moving target with an AK-47, she would never understand. She just couldn’t seem to think like them. Despite repeatedly hearing their philosophies about why this was important, she just didn’t agree. Rolling her already sore shoulder, she felt certain that when she finally managed to master the use of the weapon she was holding, she’d never have a call to use it. She would however have to practice with it at least once a week or her pappy and uncles would make her do it every day like they had for the past two weeks.

Tessa wasn’t bad with a gun most of the time but this one was heavier and kind of bulky for her five-foot frame. She found herself hailed as ‘the prissy one’ by the family often. That was fine with her because it allowed her to get out of a lot of the chores that her family did each week, like wiring the perimeter of the compound or making sure that the twelve-foot fence was secure. Tessa had no wish to do these things, ever. Mostly because, like learning to shoot this gun, the tasks were pointless.

After another three rounds, she finally managed to hit the heart on one of the targets and excitement that this task might be over soon almost made her feel faint. Geez, she was glad she’d finally managed to hit one; now only two more to go and she’d be free.

“I’ll be damned. She finally hit one,” her cousin, Jim, crowed.

Tessa wanted to turn around and glare at him but she refrained. His assessment was a little unfair anyway because she had hit the target multiple times, just not in the heart. With a little huff, she reloaded and took aim again. Best to get this done.

“Yeah, but it took her two weeks to learn it. At this rate she’ll never learn to shoot the bigger guns,” Dale uttered in a snide tone.

“Dale, I said to leave the girl alone. Not every woman has a knack for weapons like your Harriet. She took to them like a fish in water,” Grant grumbled with a little chuckle at the end.

Harriet was Dale’s fourteen-year-old daughter. It was true that Harriet was a crack shot but she was also a nut. If any of the kids who lived in the compound had gone to high school, she would have been the girl voted most likely to become an axe murderer.

“That’s ’cause I started her young,” Dale said in his proud-of-his-psychopathic-daughter voice. “Unlike Diego, who thought his girls should be adults before he trained ’um. What if it had happened when they were kids? They’d be a liability, that’s what, but not my Harriet.”

Maybe calling Harriet a psychopath was a bit unfair but the kid was just a little too into the whole ‘learning to maim people’ exercises her family thought needed to be practiced regularly. Tessa was forever grateful that her pappy didn’t think his kids should be trained to use firearms or explosives until they were at least eighteen. She was twenty-six and the youngest so she was the last of her two sisters to finish her training. It was taking her longer to get through the weapon skills training than it had her sisters, mostly because she just didn’t care for it and only paid attention to the lessons so that she could get them over with.

“I can’t agree with that because I didn’t start training Jim till he was fifteen and he’s damned good,” Grant told him.

Tessa had finished reloading the gun and was again taking aim at the targets.  Her shoulder was sore from the repeated kick that the gun discharged every time she fired it. She wanted to tell them she had better things to do than this but she knew the can of worms that would open up. She would be in for another long lecture about why it was important now that the world might fall apart at any moment. The theories on why that would happen were varied; her crazy uncles thought some zombie virus would break out, her pappy thought that someone would set off an EMP, and still others here thought there would be a total collapse of the economy.

There were more theories, everything from natural disasters to manmade ones, that were tossed around and they were somehow preparing for all of them at once. Not that she believed for even a second any of them would ever happen. Nope, twenty years from now she’d be living in this three-hundred-acre compound and the world outside would still be going on like normal without her. Tessa wasn’t dissing her family, she just wanted them to allow her to not be a part of their crazy ideology without being criticized as that weird one who didn’t believe in their doomsday preparations.

Her family’s crazy prepping for the apocalypse had started about fifty-eight years ago when her grandfather was about thirty and his great uncle died, leaving him a millionaire. That had been the beginning of the compound—a massive underground bunker that spanned nearly two hundred of their three hundred acres. He’d always been convinced after leaving the army that there would be a military takeover that would lead to the fall of society. Being a Vietnam vet had shaped his entire view of the world and the reception when he’d returned to the states hadn’t been much better than the months he’d spent traipsing through the jungles. Was it any wonder that he thought the world would end in a complete societal breakdown?

Tessa was sure her poor grandfather had PTSD when he’d returned—but regardless of why he thought as he did after returning from the army, the compound had been born. Her abuelo and two of his army buddies of a similar mindset with money to burn had created a home where they could raise families in what they felt was a safe place. They’d bought a three hundred acre tree farm and turned it into the massive underground bunker they now called home. He grandfather had the compound built by an out of state builder—who later joined them inside with his family—so no one in state would know about the structure or the layout. Tessa wasn’t entirely sure if the builder had chosen to live here or if her grandfather had forced the poor man to move in to keep anyone from knowing the layout of the place. He had been a fanatic and that never went well for anyone involved. She was sure he would have thought it was necessary despite it being morally wrong.

A year after the compound had been built, her grandfather had met a Mexican-American immigrant who he’d swept off her feet and whisked away to his underground home. They’d had three children—her father and his two brothers—that they raised inside the high electric fences topped with razor wire. Tessa had heard the stories that all revolved around the sad fact that they never really ventured out into the outside world except for the once a month supply runs. It was a sheltered and insolated life that they’d shared with five other families who were also part of the first generation.

Most of the kids who’d been raised in the compound stayed but one or two had ventured out into the real world to live. None of them had ever returned. Most of the people living here thought that was because something terrible had happened to them. Tessa, however, suspected they’d just never wanted to come back and live with their crazy family in their underground bunker and she couldn’t blame them.

The community had grown since it was started back in 1969 and now there were about forty families living and working in the compound and they were like a self-sustaining machine. After the attacks from 9/11 in 2001, eight new families had undergone the extensive application process to become a part of the compound. Three of the applicants were accepted so now they had forty-three families, she supposed.

To her all of this was just her oddball family’s way to make a place where they fit in, but she was different. Ever since Tessa was ten and her pappy shared his views with her, she’d felt like all of this doomsday stuff just wasn’t for her—she’d always been an avid reader and it had likely exposed her to more of the outside world than any of the others had ever known. After she’d turned eighteen she’d known that if she had her way, she would prefer to live in the normal world.

Tessa was an adult now so she did have a choice, but where would she go and how would she live? The reality was she had no real job skills and very little money and unless being able to tend a hydroponics farm, wire an electric fence, or shoot any weapon you could find were necessary job skills, she was out of luck. Maybe she would be able to get a job if she left, but if she didn’t she knew that her family wouldn’t support the move because despite her being that odd one who didn’t understand that the world’s inevitable doom was on the horizon, they loved her.

Sighing heavily, she knew she was never going to learn this if she didn’t concentrate. She raised the weapon again and aimed down the sight.

It took another hour for her to finally manage to hit the target several times accurately. Her Uncles had grumbled when she’d asked if she was free to go after hitting the heart five times. Dale wanted her to practice more and Grant was complaining about her lack of dedication. Tessa took the problem out of their hands by slipping away after they started arguing again. She walked along the wall to head back inside the confines of the underground bunker to get her book. Her shoulder ached and she rolled it trying to loosen it, almost sure it was going to be bruised.

She was about halfway down the hall with her room in sight when Hanna popped up from behind one of the concrete road barriers that were in every hall in case the compound was somehow breached and they needed cover to fight off the intruders. Tessa shook her head—yeah, like that was ever going to be necessary—and jumped a little in surprise.

“What’cha doing?” Hanna asked.

Her small figure only came up to Tessa’s hip. She had on army fatigues complete with a gun belt—that thankfully didn’t have a gun attached—and a flashlight. Her blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail that flowed down her back. Her tiny face was screwed up in a concentrated expression.

“Going to my room,” Tessa told her as she kept walking.

“Thought you had lessons today? You’re not skipping them, are you? ’Cause if you are I’m tellin’ on you,” Hanna said in an annoying singsong voice.

Tessa stopped walking and mentally counted to ten. Hanna was only six and despite her being one of the most annoying children in the world, she didn’t deserve to be yelled at. Tessa’s teeth were on edge and she looked at the girl with narrowed green eyes.

“I’m not, so you might as well find someone else to hunt down and bother.”

“Nobody else wants to play with me,” Hanna said, a slight pout on her pink rosebud lips.

Tessa wanted to tell her that was because she was an annoying little shit but she always felt sorry for Hanna because she was ignored by her family. Her pappy, despite his crazy ideas, had never ignored her or her sisters. Hanna’s mother and father, on the other hand, didn’t really want anything to do with her unless they were showing her off like a status symbol. Tessa figured that was why Hanna was so annoying because at least if she was, she’d get attention.

“Shouldn’t you be in class anyway?” Tessa asked because all the kids had school in the mornings every weekday. There were thirty-six kids currently living in the compound and they were all schooled by three retired teachers who lived here.

“Nope, it was canceled because Thomas broke the water pipe in the school room,” Hanna said gleefully.

Thomas was another sad case and no one knew what to do for the poor kid. He was currently living with Abe because three months ago his mother had died. Abe had agreed to take the boy in when his mom passed without any next of kin to take care of him. He was eight and troubled since her death. They had a psychologist in the compound who was trying to help him and Abe to adjust but the kid was angry and rebellious.

“I see. Well I’m going to my apartment and I don’t want any company so go find something else to do.” Tessa waved her hand in the general direction of the common area.

“There isn’t anything to do. I’m bored and the other kids won’t let me play hide and seek with them because I always win. They’re dumb,” Hanna whined, looking down at her shoes with a sadness Tessa wanted to ignore but couldn’t evident on her tiny features.

Damn it, why the hell was she such a softy.

“Fine, you can come to my room and play on the computer for a little while but I’m going to be reading so you need to keep the noise to a minimum,” Tessa finally said after a quick internal debate about why she should be nice to the annoying child.

“The shooter one?” Hanna asked making Tessa roll her eyes.

“Sure, why not,” Tessa replied, wishing already that she’d ignored the kid’s plight.

“Awesome!” Hanna raced ahead of her towards her apartment and Tessa followed, still berating herself for being a soft-hearted fool.