by Sean Patten
The short-haired girl was first, disappearing into the masses with a shriek and then nothing. Next I watched as the man with the goatee and a Russia theory was grabbed by the shoulder and pulled hard enough to fall flat on his face, vanishing underfoot.
Death by stampede. It was about the most horrible thing I could imagine, your last thoughts being of feet crushing the life out of you, your hands reaching up in vain to grab onto something, anything, as you faded into black.
Not for me. I pressed on, thanking God or whatever was up there that I hadn’t slacked on my physical training over the last year. My lungs felt aflame and my throat was raw from the breathing, but I finally began to put some distance between myself and the rest of the crowd.
Back behind us I heard gunshots crack over the sound of the crowd. I knew what this meant, that the cops had been overrun and had turned their weapons on the civilians in a last-ditch effort to keep them at bay.
Don’t think about that. Just keep moving.
“Justin!” shouted Steve. “Where are we going?”
Up ahead I saw the overpass that we’d taken to the airport. Where it was empty before, now it was packed to the edges with people, some spilling over and falling from the edges, landing on the concrete below with sickening thuds and cracks.
“Road’s no good!” I said. “Come on!”
The thinking of a crowd has two traits: it thinks collectively, and it follows the path of least resistance. In this case, that meant that the crowd was moving ahead blindly, only watching where other people were going. The on-ramp, despite being just as bad as the area in front of the terminal we’d all just escaped from, had people. And if people were there, that meant it was the correct place to go, right?
That’s how a crowd thinks. And I knew that if I wanted to survive, I had to think like a single person, one who wanted to live.
“We’re not taking the road!” I shouted. “Come on!”
Steve picked up his pace and was soon right at my side. I glanced over at him as we ran. The man might’ve gone a little LA-soft in the heart over the years, but physically he was still in top shape.
Up ahead I spotted the large, square shape of a building I recognized right away to be a parking garage. Only a small trickle of people were making their way towards it.
“There!” I said.
“Got it!” he said.
We crossed over the four-lane road in front of the entrance terminal and soon were inside the dark interior of the garage.
Once there, away from the crowds, I leaned against the nearest car and caught my breath.
“Holy shit,” said Steve as he stopped next to me and did the same. “Did you…did you see that?”
“Yeah, I saw it,” I said quietly, not wanting to linger on the subject.
I heaved my body around and took in the scene. The crowds were still moving climbing over one another to get as far away from the burning terminal as they could. Small explosions broke out here and there as the impact of the plane ignited one fuel store after another. Screams flowed through the air, the entire scene lit up by the light of the crash.
“I saw some guy,” Steve said, still catching his breath. “Was right at my side. Then someone grabbed onto him and just pulled him down, stepped over him like it was nothing.”
“That’s what happens,” I said. “The same shit that we saw at the Medley. Total fight-or-flight.”
“Looked like nothing but flight to me,” he said. “And death.”
“It’s why we need to put as much distance between us and people as possible,” I said. “You saw how that was—they held it together for a little while when they thought everything was still normal. But as soon as that plane hit the runway it was over.”
“I still can’t believe that,” he said. “How the hell was that plane even still up in the air? Shouldn’t they all have dropped out of the sky or something?”
“‘Not necessarily,” I said. “It depends on the aircraft, and the wave of energy that’s hitting it. What might have happened in this case, with the EMP pulse, is that everything electronic in the plane would go dark. But the engines, the mechanical parts, they’d still work.”
“They’d just be flying blind,” he said.
“Right. And the pilots in that plane must’ve tried to make a blind landing without any help from guidance computers or air traffic control.”
“Goddamn,” he said. “And smashed right into the runway.”
I nodded.
“That’s what’s happening all over the country right now—planes full of passengers flying blind, the pilots wondering whether or not to wait and see if things or back to normal, or to try a landing.”
Kelly was one of those passengers. Hell, for all I knew the plane that had hit the terminal was hers. I could’ve arrived at the airport just in time to watch my wife go up in a ball of flame.
Too horrible to think about. I put it out of my mind as best I could and focused on the moment, the here and now.
I said it again in my mind over and over.
Here and now. Here and now.
“Justin,” said Steve, his gaze fixed over my shoulder. “We need to move.”
I glanced back in the direction his eyes were fixed and saw what he was referring to. Off in the middle distance portions of the crowd had finally gotten it into their collective head that the road was a no-go, and that the parking garage was the place to be.
“Shit,” I said. “Come on.”
The horde of people grew closer by the second, that familiar roar of panic and desperation arriving right along with them. I took in one last full breath before turning towards the far end of the parking garage and taking off in a run.
Steve was right there with me, and by the time we reached the middle of the garage the crowds had poured over the sides. The sharp crash of windows breaking sounded here and there, people either pointlessly looting, or even more pointlessly trying to steal the useless cars.
We kept going, the crowd gaining on us. Some ran up the ramps leading to the top floors, thinking in an animal-instinct way that higher meant better. Soon I spotted the other side of the garage.
“Jump over it!” I said. “As fast as you can!”
“Got it!” he said.
The two of us approached the side and then quickly climbed over it. The drop-off was further down that I’d anticipated and I hit the ground with a thud, Steve landing right next to me.
“Ah, shit!”
I was about to run, but I realized that Steve was on the ground. Turning my attention to him, I saw that he was curled up in a tight ball on the ground, his hands wrapped around his thigh.
“Fuck,” he moaned. “Ah, damn, it hurts!”
Oh, no.
Chapter 25
I dropped down to my knees and assessed the situation.
“What happened?” I asked, my tone tinged with frantic energy.
“I fell on something!”
Sure enough, right on the ground next to his leg was a foot-long piece of jagged glass, one end tinged with the dark red of fresh blood.
“Let me see it,” I said. “Come on.”
Steve bit down on his lower lip as he took his hands from the wound.
Oh no. Oh, God no.
Right along the length of Steve’s thigh was a long slice, one that had cut through the fabric of his pants. Blood seeped from the wound.
“Ah, ah,” he said, his eyes winced shut. “Is it bad?”
“It’s fine,” I said, not knowing one way or another. “But I need to see it better.”
He let out another cry of pain as he turned his body so that I could get a closer look.
The wound was a nearly perfect straight line, about four inches long. Through the blood I could make out the first layer of muscle, red and raw. It was deep, through all the skin.
But it didn’t look as if it had gone far enough to sever an artery. If it had…
I didn’t even want to think about it.
I
pulled my shirt off, the evening desert air cool on my skin and wicking the sweat instantly. I wrapped it around his leg, pulling it tight. Steve hissed in pain again as I did.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I need to apply pressure and stop the bleeding.”
“I get it,” he said. “Just do what you need to do.”
I gave the shirt one more pull, another cry of pain sounded from Steve as the fabric pressed down on the wound.
“Oh damn,” he said, shaking his head.
“How is it?” I asked.
“Hurts like a bitch,” he said.
“Can you walk?”
Steve put his hands onto the dirty floor and heaved himself to his feet. But as soon as he put pressure on his legs, the knee below the wound buckled and he dropped down to the ground.
“It’s…it’s not supporting me,” he said.
“Shit,” I said.
“Just leave me here, bro,” he said. “I’ll figure something out.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just head due north and I’ll catch up to you. Don’t want to drag you down.”
“Not a chance,” I said. “If you think I’m leaving you behind you’re out of your damned mind.”
A small smile formed on his face.
“Stubborn asshole,” he said.
I stuck out my hand towards him.
“Come on,” I said. “We need to find someplace to spend the night.”
Steve reached up and grabbed onto me, and I pulled him to his feet. As he rose, I slipped my arm around his back, easing up the pressure on his leg. People rushed by us, but the crowd had thinned out. We had time, but not much.
“Okay,” he said. “Where to?”
I looked around for something, anything that would provide a clue of where we could go. The majority of people were headed towards the road, which meant that wasn’t an option. Then I spotted something, power lines attached to the top of the parking garage. I tracked them, and saw that they went out into the desert, attaching to an electrical tower, then another, then disappearing into the distance.
I had an idea.
“That way,” I said, pointing the direction the power lines traveled.
“What?” he asked. “Out into the middle of nowhere?”
“Nowhere’s better than somewhere,” I said. “If what we just left is what ‘somewhere’ is.”
He bit down on his lip as a fresh wave of pain appeared to run through his body.
“Right,” he said. “Anything away from people.”
“Now you’re thinking like a survivalist,” I said.
“God help me,” he said right back.
My arm around Steve, I started off.
We moved slowly, very slowly. The back of my neck tingled as we made our way off the grounds of the airport and deeper into the desert. I had nightmare images of someone following us, watching from afar to see where this wounded pair was off to.
It wouldn’t be long before people began to think in this way. I imagined weeks into the future, the road we’d taken to the airport packed with highwaymen ready to kill for a bottle of water. I’d need a gun, some kind of weapon. My thoughts went to my stockpile at home, wishing I had even a single combat knife. Hell, even the multi-tool in my luggage could prove to make the difference between life and death.
No point thinking about it. Here and now.
We moved deeper into the desert, silence falling around us as we put more and more distance between us and the airport. The shirt had stemmed the flow of blood from Steve’s wound, but he still left a trickle behind him, fresh droplets falling from his leg onto the rust-red earth.
“I don’t want to nag,” he said. “But I’d feel a hell of a lot better if you told me what you had in mind.”
“Somewhere in the desert,” I said. “Somewhere we can hide out.”
“That’s…still pretty vague,” he said.
I said nothing. I had a place in mind, all right, but I didn’t want to get his hopes up.
We continued on, and before too long my muscles began to cry out in exhaustion. Between everything that had happened between the casino and now, I’d put more stress on it in the last few hours than I had in the last month. God knows where I’d be if I’d been in worse shape than I was.
After another twenty minutes the airport disappeared behind us over the horizon. The power lines overhead were the only sign of civilization.
“We could climb up one of these things,” Steve said. “Build a nest like a couple of birds.”
I let out a dry laugh.
“Only kind of nest I’m interested in is of the sniping variety,” I said.
“Speaking of which,” said Steve. “I wish we’d grabbed a gun or something from the casino.”
“No sense in worrying about it now,” I said. “We can figure all that out in the morning.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m running on fumes, if we’re being honest.”
We continued on. As we moved I could feel Steve’s body go slack against mine. Not only was he running out of steam, he had a bad wound to contend with.
“See anything little brother?” he asked.
I squinted in the darkness.
“Nothing so far.”
A moment of silence passed.
“Listen,” he said. “If I start to get too heavy—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I’m just saying. No sense in us both dying.”
“I said, ‘shut up’.”
Another beat of silence.
“You actually said ‘shut the fuck up.’”
I allowed myself a small smile.
“Smartass.”
We were deep into the desert now, the power lines still overhead.
But right at the moment I began to worry I might’ve led the two of us to our deaths, I spotted something off in the distance. It was an oddly shaped structure surrounded by a tall steel fence.
“There!” I said, pointing ahead with my free hand.
“What…what is it?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” I said. “Come on.”
I picked up our pace, the destination now in sight. It grew and grew as we approached, and soon Steve let out a happy cry as he realized what it was.
“Holy shit!” he said. “It’s one of those electrical places!”
“That’s right,” I said. “An electrical substation.”
“You’re a damn genius,” he said.
“Nah, just figured these power lines had to lead to somewhere.”
Before too long we reached the fence. I scanned the area for the door.
“Justin,” said Steve. “Look.”
He pointed to a large sign on the fence, on that read “DANGER — NO TRESPASSING — HIGH VOLTAGE — KEEP OUT.”
Then a look of understanding formed on his face.
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
“Here,” I said. “I’m going to put you down for a second.”
He nodded, and I gingerly set him back onto the ground. Once I had my hands free, I grabbed the nearest large rock I could and brought it down hard on the fence’s padlock. It took a few hard smashes, but I eventually got it open.
“Come on,” I said, picking Steve back up and leading him inside.
Within the perimeter of the fence, among the lifeless electrical equipment, was a medium-sized shack. The door was opened slightly, and it appeared that however had been there had left in a hurry, but at least had the presence of mind to lock the fence.
The interior was a small space, but it was clean. A pair of small, metal desks were there, along with a few bookshelves packed with technical material.
I set Steve down on the ground, but before I’d had even a moment to collect myself, a thundering explosion boomed through the quiet night air.
Chapter 26
“What the hell was that?”
I knew. I didn’t even need to look.
But look I did.
&n
bsp; I stepped over to the door and pulled it open. Off in the distance, in the direction of the airport, a massive, blossoming fireball arose off the horizon. It expanded slowly, like a flower opening.
“Is that…” asked Steve.
“Yeah,” I answered. “The airport.”
“Goddamn,” he said.
“The fire must’ve finally hit the main fuel stores.”
“That’s…insane,” he said. “All those people…”
“Most of them will have gotten clear by now,” I said. “Hopefully.”
Steve took in a slow, deep breath, clearly trying to process what he was witnessing, what he’d been through.
“This is…this is for real,” he said, his eyes still on the now-fading explosion.
“It’s as real as it gets,” I said. “And it’s just getting started.”
I scanned the place for anything we could use. On the desk was a large jug of water and I quickly grabbed it and handed it to Steve.
“Drink,” I said. “But pace yourself—that might need to last.”
He nodded in understanding before hefting the bottle with both hands to his mouth and taking a long sip. Once he was done, he handed it to me and I did the same. The water tasted like ambrosia, and I had to pull my mouth away before I drank the whole thing.
Once I’d had my fill I began rooting through the drawers of the desks. The first drawer I opened had nothing but paper, but the second contained a half-full bottle of vodka.
“Yes,” I said to myself as I took it out.
Steve glanced over.
“One way to take the edge off,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not thinking about getting drunk.”
Bottle in hand, I stepped over to Steve and took off the shirt I’d tied around him. Then, I undid the cap of the vodka and stuck it in front of him.
“Take a sip,” I said. “This is going to hurt like a bitch.”
He took a quick pull and handed the bottle back.
“What is?” he asked.
“This.”
I titled the bottle and dumped it onto his wound. Steve let out a howl of pain as the vodka trickled into the gash.