Free 2nd Earth: Shortfall by Edward Vought Page A

assure her I’m fine, and I tell her to stay in the building, we will take care of the shooter or shooters. She seems to calm down a little when she hears that I am okay, at least for the time being. From the sound of the shots the shooter is using an M14 military weapon. Definitely enough gun to kill someone in the wrong hands. It seems to take forever, although I am sure it is no more than a few minutes before I hear the report of that .307 we found. I see a predator break cover about a hundred yards away and then the gun barks again and he goes down. It doesn’t look like he will be getting up any time soon if ever.
    I start to stand up and almost get hit by another shot from a different direction, the .307 speaks loud and clear, and then I hear Tim call down to me they are running away. He asks if he should shoot more of them. I tell him not to bother, but it is clear to us that the predators are getting more serious now than they have ever been in the past. It is only mid-afternoon when we all meet in the house. I ask Tom and Billy’s mom if they can see any reason why we don’t leave right now. If worse comes to worse we can find another building to stay in overnight closer to where we are going. At least that will put some distance between us and the predators. We throw everything we own in the trucks, everyone loads into the vans and trucks wherever they can find a seat and we head south to no one knows what. Oh yeah, we take long enough to say a family prayer before we leave.
    It is slow going, picking our way through the city, until we get on what I guess could be called a highway that avoids at least some of the city. We picked up two more small families on our way through the city, all women and young girls. We tell them we don’t know exactly where we are going, and they say they don’t care as long as it is anywhere, but here. We get to New Jersey before dark and find a reasonably nice building in what used to be a shopping center. The nice thing about this place is that we can park the vehicles where we can watch them. We take turns standing guard during the night to make sure no one bothers them. In the morning we take off as soon as the sun comes up. We find a market with lots of canned goods still in it so we get breakfast from there, and then about an hour later we find a gas station with a generator that I am able to get running enough to fill all the vehicles. That takes an hour and we are joined by another mother with two children that look to be around eight and ten. They say they haven’t seen anyone else in a long time and were beginning to think they were the only ones left alive.
    We are making better time than we thought we would. The main roads are rough, but at least we can get through the cars parked on them, and the pavement, although broken and buckled in places, isn’t as bad as it could be. We are going through southeast Pennsylvania in the afternoon when we come upon a road block with three men standing on the road, they are all carrying guns. Tim and I get out after stopping a little ways back from them. We have three guns trained on the men just in case this doesn’t go well. The three men are definitely low life trash that would have to improve to be called a predator. We can smell them from ten feet away when we get closer to them. They ask us what we have in the trucks, and say that we have to pay the toll to use their road. We are looking around and don’t see anyone else and there isn’t much cover around here.
    I ask them how much the toll is, and they all get a really disgusting smirk on their faces saying they want women. One of them is waving a rusty pistol around like he thinks we are afraid of him or something. I tell him I’m sorry, but all the women in our family are married, so they will have to ask for something else. This makes them think we are afraid of them, one of the others says they will take young ones. They don’t care how old they are. No matter what