Free Bug Out by G. Allen Mercer

come get him after everyone is safe, right?”
    Ian patted the boy on the shoulder.  “What’s your name, son?”
    “Adam, sir.  Adam Tiller.”
    “Well, Adam, I hope so,” he said.  “Now, let’s get off of this damn bridge!”
    “Yes, sir!”

CHAPTER 14
     
     
     
    Dukes wrote down the notes as fast as the voice was speaking the code.  He would have to spend time decoding the transmission later, but he knew that this one would be important.  This was a transmission from one of his trusted sources outside of San Diego.  He was a brother Marine, having served with Dukes during Desert Storm; and he was one of the few people that Dukes trusted with intel.
    “What was that one about?” June heard the word, ‘over,’ and knew that she could ask the question.
    “I don’t know, but it’s detailed.”  His notes filled up an entire piece of paper.
    Over the last few days, a network of short-wave HAM radio hounds had been accumulating and passing information all around the country.  This particular message was the first direct communication with anyone from the West Coast.  The transmission had originating from southern California and was full of as much fear and confusion as the ones Dukes had been hearing from out of the mid-west or the northeast.  It might even be full of as much fear as Dukes had been broadcasting the last few days.
    He started working out the code while sitting at the dinning table.  It was a double code, drawing from two different military sources.  He had used the same code during Desert Storm and then the military retired it.  But, that didn’t mean that the former military people couldn’t use it.
    “Son of a…” Dukes whispered.
    “What is it?” Penny asked.  She had been helpful to her father, taking over the manning of the radio when he needed sleep.  She knew the same code, thanks to her father, and was looking over his shoulder as he deciphered.
    “Wow!” she said, running the encryption faster in her head than her father could on paper.
    “What does it say?  You’re a lot faster.”
    She sat down slowly, reading the entire time.  “It says that the shipping docks and neighborhoods around the docks in San Francisco were gassed, and that freighter ships are unloading tanks and troops at the ship yards.”
    “Gassed?”
    “Yeah,” she read further down the page.  “Sarin gas.” She looked horrified.  “That’s illegal, right?”
    “So is launching a nuclear bomb.   Apparently killing an entire city by gas is nothing once you’ve nuked a city!”
    She kept reading.  “There are multiple reports that the L.A. ports were also gassed and that the Naval shipyard, base and Marine station at San Diego are under bombardment.”
    “I got this one about 10 minutes ago, he handed her his transposed notes from another source.  This guy’s is in San Antonio.  It says that the ports in Corpus Christi and Galveston were attacked last night the same way.”
    “What about Mobile and New Orleans?” June asked, after listening to the worried volley of information.
    “I haven’t heard, but, now that you say that…and with those helos flying around,” his voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.
    “What are you thinking?” June pressed.
    He wrote a few things down before facing his wife and daughter.  He thought he had it figured out.
    “I think the reason I haven’t heard anything from my friends in Mobile or New Orleans area is that ‘they’ are already there.  Those cities have been the bases of operation for the drones, the helicopters and what ever else.  I bet, they gassed the place just like they did the ones on the West Coast!”
    “But why would they attack our ports that way?  What do they want?  Where’s our military?” Penny asked with a true sense of worry.
    Dukes had been asking the same questions.  He found it frightening that he had not heard an ‘official’ government broadcast or seen any resistance in the air to