by Jay Vielle
FIRST WEEKS AFTER
Book 2 in the Cataclysm Series
By J.V.Lowe
MARYLAND, WASHINGTON, AND VIRGINIA
PA
Emmitsburg
Maryland
WV Washington DE
Virginia
Glenmont
WASHINGTON D.C.
Bladensburg
Anacostia River
National Mall
Pentagon
PROLOGUE
So—where do I begin? In the past two weeks, I have seen more shit than most people will read about in a lifetime. About two weeks ago, our president got into a world-class urinating contest with just about every other world leader on the planet. This kind of thing was in no way unprecedented--in fact, he had been doing it for years with nearly anyone who challenged U.S. supremacy in just about anything. But several weeks ago, some of the smaller, more radical countries began to up the ante in the machismo-riddled poker game. Speculation runs amok as to who started what, but the bottom line was the same kind of entangling alliances that led to World War I at the turn of the twentieth century. Like that war, this one offered combinations of weapons never before seen or heard of. The Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, several Middle Eastern countries, Cuba, and Venezuela all joined together to take down the tyrannical United States. Much of Europe came to our defense, as did Japan, India, and a few non-descript South American countries. Nearly everyone had some type of nuclear weapon, and nearly everyone launched something within the span of a few days.
A new friend of mine who played a major role in developing defensive strategies for most of the attacks told me that the Russians coordinated everything. They wanted to be the ones to target the United States, and given their proximity and their technological superiority, no one challenged them to that honor. They had developed new weapons that would maximize human casualties while maintaining as much infrastructure as possible. When the smoked cleared in this fray, Russia wanted to occupy a new piece of real estate—and they didn’t want to have to rebuild it all. They wanted it intact.
That meant that much of the standard, “old-fashioned” nuclear weapons fired by Russia’s allies landed elsewhere. I can only imagine what Europe and Asia look like right now. We have too many problems here ourselves to worry about them just yet. In the week or so since the first bombs dropped, things have been unpredictable. Most communication has been out, though sometimes it will come back on. Some places have been sent back to the 18th century—no electricity, no modern conveniences, and people descending into greedy and predatory behaviors. Yet there are also quite a few towns where life has gone on without much of a change at all. It all kind of depends on where you are in proximity to where bombs went off, and what kind of defenses were there when they did.
But truthfully what is most pervasive about these times--these first weeks after the Cataclysm, as they’ve come to call it--is the not knowing. Not being sure about anything. One person’s reality is most certainly not every person’s reality. I’m trying to get a grip on my own reality, and that hasn’t been easy after all I did and saw last week. I was removed from my converted workplace by a group of fundamentalist religious extremists who want to take over the city we live in and reform it in their image; I fought off gun-toting gang members out to rob me and do me harm; I escaped the clutches of ex-criminals who had taken over a town and tried to sell me into slavery; I rescued two high-level military people who were working on nuclear weapons defenses from an attacking group of mutated human beings trying to eat them, and now I am about to head towards our currently closed-down, under-Marshall-law nation’s capital in an attempt to rescue my parents from a bomb shelter and perhaps capture and try to reclaim one of the mutated creatures there—who also happens to be the wife of my best friend.
I know what you’re thinking: that all sounded a little insane. Especially when I read it back to myself out loud. Let me slow down a minute and explain some of that, as it’s not all a hundred percent accurate. Most of it is—but with some points that need clarifying. My name is Eduardo Reyes—Eddie to my friends. I am a high school history teacher. I guess I should say ‘was’ a high school history teacher—it’s just that I haven’t come to grips with the new reality. It’s so insane right now that I can’t believe that it’s not a dream, and that I won’t wake up tomorrow and find out I’m late for class.
But I won’t, because it’s all happening just like I said. Okay, almost like I said. I actually was involved in every one of those things I mentioned. I just wasn’t really the hero of the tale. We’ve actually had a few heroes in this tale, to be honest. I’m mostly the tale teller. My ancestors were from Peru, which makes them Inca, according to my parents. The Inca had people who were in charge of accounting and recounting things. Camayocs, they were called. I don’t have much contact with my ancestors, and I don’t even remember much about the last time my parents took me back to Peru. But I do know that the Camayocs were the ‘rememberers.’ They were the ones in charge of making sure that the stories were told correctly and passed on. That’s mostly what I’m doing here.
So, in a nutshell…the first days after the bombings, everything closed. Mandates came in from state and federal levels to close things down, find shelter, and wait for instructions. Those instructions never really came. I work at Hunter’s Run High School in Emmitsburg, Maryland. It’s a little town in the northern part of the state just outside the Catoctin Mountains, near Camp David. Our town was both blessed and cursed with that proximity, as it became a major target for countries looking to aim at Camp David and anyone from our government who might be hiding there. The blessing came in the form of a special defense that Camp David possessed—an almost aerial lead “shield” counter measure to exploding bombs that protected us from the deadly aftermath that reached our county’s largest city, Frederick. That mean that Emmitsburg was mostly spared from the kind of harm that befell Washington, Baltimore, Annapolis, Norfolk, Virginia, and even nearby Frederick just a few miles down the road.
What we were not spared was the human tendency to take advantage of others during times of crisis. About thirty of us hunkered down in the high school at first. It was going pretty well, with people working together and making the most out of what we had—which was ample. Then it all went to shit. In-fighting among the survivors, several attacks from local gangbangers, and the next thing you know about a half dozen of us were exiled. Banished from the place we’d called home. Luckily, we had among us a leader with some direction. Jake Fisher—a teacher and coach in his forties who had previously been a Marine in Iraq—decided to go find his collegiate sons, and he took us with him. It was Jake who had initially set up our camp in the high school. Without him we’d have been pretty lost. Then half of those bastards decided to throw him out. Jake had protected us from the gang members. ‘Protected,’ I call it, but that’s kind of a euphemism—he killed them with his bare hands. Literally. I watched it. There was a family from our school. They were in their car, just outside, when they were approached by three thugs. One had a knife, one had a gun, and one had a bat. When the dust cleared, two were dead, and Jake had half blinded the third and told him that if he ever came back, he’d finish the job.
Then he defended us again when we went out to recon the local Wal-Mart for supplies. Four gangbangers tried to assault us and rob the store. One of them was the guy with one eye. Jake went a little crazy on them. I’m honestly not even sure how bad off he left them before we escaped and went back to Hunter’s Run with five carts full of supplies from the Wal-Mart that the assistant manager there, Estela Fuentes, had helped us load and bring, as a way of thanking us for protecting her. That’s when the teachers who were also members of the Church of Many Blessings
decided to spin the truth a little and convince the other survivors that Jake was violent, murderous, and a danger to all of us. They bought it, and they voted to send Jake packing.
A few of us decided to go packing with him, rather than stay. It shouldn’t matter, but it’s worth mentioning that I am gay. It’s also worth mentioning that I’m Hispanic—although you probably put that together when I mentioned that I’m Peruvian. The Church of Many Blessings isn’t too fond of folks that look like me or think like me. It seems that they are a bit more selective when it comes to members of their congregation, meaning everyone was whiter and straighter than I am. So those of us at the high school who leaned a little more left, and who consider themselves a bit less judgmental of others, decided to join Jake Fisher on a school bus for a quest to find his sons, Tommy and Vinny, in southwestern Virginia. Along the way we picked up a few strays, including Estela—the assistant manager of the Wal-Mart I mentioned before; Morgan—a friend of Vinny’s at Virginia Tech, who along the way became romantically involved with Estela; Colonel Raymond Cannaveral—a chemical weapons defense specialist who was trapped at Fort Detrick after the bombings; and Wendy Yubashiri—an NIH infectious disease specialist, who was his partner at Fort Detrick.
We were riding back from Lexington on our way to Washington when we were detoured by a fallen tree and some crashed vehicles into a small town in the mountains called Front Royal. It would have been a delightful little town; had it not been taken over by a band of ex-cons who fancied themselves Apocalyptic warlord Godfather types. They were running drugs, capturing and selling people as slaves and prostitutes to the Russian mob, and had taken all of us captive. We were well on our way to becoming someone else’s property when an internal coup broke their little operation apart and provided us a brief, unexpected escape route. We took it and headed to D.C. as fast as our bus could carry us. The hope was to get Wendy and the Colonel to someone in the Department of Defense to let them know the vital new information they had on the effects of the Russian weapons that had been dropped on Washington and Frederick, among other places. Truth was, those two were lucky that they had run into us.
Wendy and the Colonel had to be rescued from their laboratory from these bizarre, mutated, humanoid things that had orange skin and white hair. As it turns out, those things were the small percentage of the human beings NOT killed instantly by the newest Russian weapon that Wendy and the Colonel had been working on defenses to. The mutates, as Wendy and the Colonel called them, had mostly devolved into a practically bestial ape-like form and roved in packs trying to feed themselves. And they are carnivorous—which made things especially problematic. But not all of them devolve, apparently. In each pack, two or three mutates retain the coloration, but walk upright and look much more human. It’s those “alphas” that call the shots in terms of how the pack will be directed.
And that’s where we come in now. After coming back from our quest, we had failed to make it into Washington D.C.—stopped cold by a military roadblock. The Colonel left our group to try and bring news of the mutates to his superiors in D.C. The rest of us returned home to Emmitsburg to re-group and decide what to do next. That’s when things really when the shit really hit the fan. We had just arrived at Jake’s house, and were showering up, getting some much-needed food and rest, when his sons discovered that the cable television was back up and running. Jake’s youngest son, Vinny, had just turned on the news, only to find that Washington also had packs of mutates running around. Then Vinny recognized one of the leaders of the pack: it was his mother, Laura. Jake’s wife—whom he believed to have died in the bombings—was not only alive but altered into one of the things we had twice narrowly escaped on our journey.
So now there I was, in the Fisher living room, looking at the faces of all three Fisher men—who were trying to figure out what the fuck to do next. I admit, I didn’t have any answers. But I was willing to bet that whatever it was that we were going to do, it would begin with a voyage to our nation’s capital. The same city that was under Marshall law. The city that had every single road going into it blocked by military. The city that had most of its inhabitants instantly killed by the new Russian weapon. The city where my parents had narrowly escaped death by making it underground into an old fallout shelter. And the city where Laura Fisher was commanding a group of mutated humans. You just can’t make this shit up.
CHAPTER 1
“God almighty,” Jake said again, his mouth agape and his brow furrowed. “It’s Laura.”
“Jesus, Dad. Mom is one of those, those things. Holy shit! What are we gonna do?” said Jake’s youngest son, Vinny.
“Dear lord, Jake! What the hell are you gonna do, now?” I chimed in. These are the kind of questions that often spontaneously come up when you find out that your wife, whom you thought dead in a World War bombing, turns out to be a mutated human with orange skin and white hair, and is currently menacing the nation’s capital.
“Oh Jake,” Wendy said. “I’m, I’m so, I don’t know what to say.” Jake’s eldest son, Tommy, slammed his fist down onto the coffee table. Suddenly our whole heroic plan was shot to shit. If you read the prologue, you know that we were currently at the Fisher residence, gathering our strength, and making plans to head into Washington D.C. We had a number of reasons to go: my parents were holed up in an old WWII bomb shelter awaiting instructions from the Army. Wendy needed to get back to her house, which she hadn’t seen for nearly two weeks due to all of the bombing taking place and her working on defenses at Fort Detrick with her old partner, Col. Ray Cannaveral. There was another girl, a friend of Vinny’s, named Morgan. She was hoping to see if her parents in Northern Virginia were still alive. Her new girlfriend, Estela, who had helped us get supplies from the Wal-Mart where she had worked, was also with us, and likely wanted stay close to Morgan, wherever she went. But mostly we were going because Jake had promised his sons, Tommy and Vinny, that as soon as he got them home, he would go looking for their mother.
Jake had been on the phone with her when the first bombs hit the Maryland area. Laura was a pharmaceutical salesperson on a run to Washington at the time. His inability to help her worked on his soul. Jake was a naturally heroic son of a bitch, to quote Tom Skerritt’s character on Top Gun. He put a lot of responsibility on himself—probably due to his time in the Marine Corps. I had known a few Marines in my day—even dated some of them—but don’t say anything about that, because they’ll all tell you there’s never been such a thing as a gay Marine. Regardless, all of them had an overdeveloped sense of duty and responsibility. Almost to the point of being pathological. Jake was included in that. He had been a Marine in Iraq during the gulf war. He had gone to Officer Candidate School with the hopes of getting in the World Class Athlete Program, or WCAP—where he would essentially have been a professional Greco-Roman wrestler, essentially practicing his sport for a government paycheck. It would have been a nice way of life for him—but then the war broke out, and he got sent over as a young lieutenant.
Things had been fairly low-key for him there until the one day he was escorting some engineers around Baghdad and was set upon by a small group of radical Islamists. He doesn’t like to tell the story much, but some dark things come out whenever he does. He essentially killed a handful of attackers by himself and saved a couple of the engineers’ lives. He will tell you that he flubbed the mission—that the American lives that were lost that day were his fault because he hadn’t scouted properly, and that he got lucky killing the attackers. His fellow Marines didn’t necessarily agree. They treated him like a celebrity and his superiors gave him that WCAP position he had originally asked for.
At any rate, no matter how far separated from the Corps he wanted to be, Jake Fisher was Semper Fi all the way. As I said, a naturally heroic son of a bitch. He was not on particularly good terms with his wife when the bombs hit. They were experiencing an awkward empty-nest situation with both boys in college, and were realizing that they had grown apart, and weren’t necessa
rily as happy as they thought they might have been. That’s enough to suffer through, but to add to that the madness we’ve had to endure the past two weeks, and now this? This had to be really tough. And if that didn’t make matters worse, Jake’s sons were pretty hard on him. To them, he wasn’t the charismatic teacher or the motivational, miracle-working wrestling coach at Hunter’s Run, or the legendary Marine. He was just Dad. And in their eyes, Dad had failed Mom time and time again. To them, he was at fault for their struggling marriage, for not protecting his wife during what was essentially World War III, or for her not being there with them right now.
Jake’s only means of redemption—in his own mind and possibly the minds of his sons—was to head down to Washington D.C., find their Mom, and find a way to reverse the process that had changed her into a mutated monster. There wasn’t one of us in the room who couldn’t take one look at him right now and realize that. Lucky for him we didn’t really have any other place to go.
Jake, are you okay?” asked Wendy.
“He’s fine,” snapped Tommy. “He’s got a job to do. That’s all.” Tommy scowled at the lovely Asian woman who had accompanied us on our journeys the week before. Wendy had been especially attentive to Jake, perhaps because Jake had saved her from the mutate attack at Fort Detrick. It is kind of natural to form an emotional attachment to someone who has literally saved your life in the most daring of ways. I don’t know what it’s called, actually. Stockholm syndrome? That’s not it. That was what they referred to Patty Hearst falling in love with her captors. Transference? That’s not quite it, either. I think that’s what patients feel for their therapists. I’m not exactly sure there is a name for it. But it was pretty obvious to me that it was there. Either way, Tommy didn’t like it. Vinny kind of ignored it, or maybe didn’t pick it up as well as his older brother. But Tommy noticed it, and his feelings were evident in his scowl most of the time she was nearby.