Camp Zero (Book 2): State of Shock Read Free Page A

you to shoot, but what about the rest?”
    “What do you mean?” she asked stroking Kiera’s hair like a puppy.
    “Fear. Back there. You had to have to been afraid.”
    “Of course.”
    I gripped the wheel a little tighter.
    “You did the same thing back at the residence in Mount Pleasant.”
    “And?”
    “No offense but it’s rare to see someone like yourself—”
    She chuckled. “What, because I’m female?”
    “No.”
    “That’s what you’re implying.”
    I cleared my throat. “Um.”
    “You are digging yourself even deeper, Sam. Quit while you’re ahead. I get the point.”
    “Right.”
    I focused on the road feeling like a jackass. Minutes later, I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. She was right. I guess what I was trying to say was that I had seen very few women like her show true grit. It was a testimony to Murphy. He had raised a kid who could not only protect herself but she was smart and crafty.

Chapter 3
    A s we burst over a rise in the road that would lead onto a trail that went out to the bunker, we saw smoke rising. A thick billow of black cloud hung in the air. At first we thought the forest itself was on fire. We had come across a few small forest fires over the past few months. Mostly it came from survivors who hadn’t extinguished campfires. No one seemed to care anymore about how it might affect others.
    I squinted, then my jaw dropped.
    I gunned the engine and it roared as we tried to get back as fast as possible.
    The truck couldn’t go fast enough. Panic began to flood in at the thought that the bunker had caught fire or worse — come under attack. There were any number of things that could have gone wrong. While its location shouldn’t have been visible to anyone driving on the main roads, noise from a gun going off might have attracted unwanted attention.
    Dan had invested over a hundred thousand dollars of his money in getting that bunker built and installed with all the gadgets and tools that a person could need to ride out an apocalypse. Until we arrived there I didn’t know what a badass prepper this guy was. Certainly our time in the wilderness had shown us that he knew his stuff when it came to survival but nothing prepared us for where we would spend the next six months. The company he had bought the underground shelter from had given him the side-by-side double shelter model. Contained far below the ground, it consisted of two pipes that were ten foot in diameter. One was used as a workshop, storage facility and plant nursery. The other had beds, couches, a kitchen, washroom, mudroom or decontamination chamber and an escape hatch. Trees, brambles and surrounding woodland hid the main entrance. The chances of us having to use the escape hatch were minimal, as unless someone lit a fire or was tracked back to the bunker, no one would know it was there. We had gone six months living inside without a problem. Sure we had come close to having strangers find it but usually they would walk straight past it. That’s why this didn’t make any sense.
    Except for a few survivors that we saw camping in the region, the only other people we had come across were in the closest town, Hayden, which was six miles from us. Last month there had been a group of military vehicles that passed through there. While Kate wanted to make it known that we had survived, Murphy and Dan were a little less enthusiastic and for good reason. We were living in a time when whatever government did exist probably had instituted martial law. Dan was nervous; some might have said he was paranoid. He wanted us to observe them. That’s what initially took us out hunting. We were going to camp a mile from the town and do reconnaissance on them, Murphy said. We’d catch our food and camp outside for a few days. That’s when our food started going missing.
    As I yanked the wheel, the truck curved onto the dirt road that led up to the woodland. All of us could now tell the smoke was coming from the