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bathroom or make it to the phone to call for help in their final moments.  We even found a body near the backdoor of one home bound in sheets and tied with ropes.  Another rotted corpse in the same house lay in the upstairs bedroom.  We guessed that the person in the bed had plans to take the son, daughter, husband, wife, neighbor, friend or whomever it was wrapped in the sheets to be buried outside.  Overwhelmed by the effects of the flu though, they’d apparently never had the capacity to undertake the burial after they’d become sick.
    All in all, it was a grim process.  Traveling from one grizzly scene of death to the next was something I found myself glad not to have to share with the rest of the group.  Some of the macabre images I saw in those houses would haunt me for the rest of my life. 
     
    Chapter 4
    Jake always tried to dry out a little bit the day of a raid.  He didn’t like it, but he felt it important to at least try to be sober when he was leading his army of mercenaries.  However, Jake knew that some within his organization fought better when high or drunk.  Therefore, he tended to leave it to the discretion of his men to make similar decisions regarding their sobriety on the date of an attack.  They knew well the consequences should they not carry out their duties as required.  Jake wasn’t one to fuck around.  A screw up could result in a bullet to the brain if the offender was lucky and a slower, more excruciating death if Jake was in a bad mood or the mistake warranted such disciplinary measures.
    Today’s raid was to be another simple one according to the advanced information they had.  Ava wasn’t even going with them.  Jake was going, but only because he was bored.  But these types of raids were becoming child’s play to him now and weren’t really doing it for him anymore.
    Jake was ready for something more, something new.
    “You sure you’re not going today?” he asked Ava.
    She turned her head away slightly to avoid the waft of Jake’s breath as they sat at the card table in the pump station’s lounge area.  “Yes,” she said.
    “Good,” Jake nodded, as if it was exactly what he wanted.  “Then I want you to come up with something better than these bullshit raids we’ve been going on lately.”  He gestured around the room, “Look at all this shit!   I’ve got nowhere to put the stuff anymore and we have to pay the fucking Y Family’s ridiculously high fees to try and move the shit we don’t want down at the Underground.  They’re the ones making out like bandits while we have to grovel like dogs fighting for scraps.”
    “So what do you want me to do about it?” Ava looked at him.
    “Come up with a plan…a plan to get us out of the trenches.  I want to stop going out and hunting.  I want the goods to start coming to us.  I want to be where the Three Families are.”
    “We’ve got a long way to go to get to that point,” Ava said, crushing out her cigarette.  “And how exactly do you expect me to come up with a plan to get us there?  You think I have these things just rolling around in my mind ripe for the picking whenever you like?  I’ve got to find the locations, scout them, find out what’s there, determine how they’re secured, and make sure they’re not protected by the Three Families.  It’s hard enough developing these small raids, then you’ve got to paint a fucking picture for the halfwits you have working for us,” she said with a hint of exasperation as she looked around at the heaps of flesh that Jake considered his army and that lay sprawled around the lounge. 
    “You mean working for me ,” Jake corrected her.
    “Whatever,” Ava said with attitude as she shook her head in disgust.
    Jake stood and grabbed her violently by the arm, pulling her up from her chair and close to him so that the wafting stench of his breath hit her full on.  She cringed more from the smell than the pain of his grip.  She actually kind