Right. So maybe not the sort of survivalist who lived in an isolated cabin in the woods, but a man who knew how to survive, regardless. Interesting.
We walked a couple more steps in silence, then heaved Angie up higher to get her onto the table in what I took to be the operating theatre. The table was surrounded by a semi-circle of counters and cabinets, all of them done in that cold, imposing stainless steel that they always used in places that specialized in cutting people.
I stifled a shiver at the thought. I might have been a soldier. That didn’t mean I liked blood. Or the thought of cutting people. I had killed more people than I could count, but I’d drawn the line at torture.
“Awfully fancy setup for a house in the middle of nowhere,” I noted.
Marlon gave me a stifled laugh. “I guess old habits die hard. I was a doctor in town in…well, one version of my real life, I guess you could say.” He left that odd sentence hanging for a moment, then continued, “Once I was forced to retire, I came out here to my vacation home and found that I was lonely for my old tools. At first, I built this place just as something to do. A way to feel like I was still important. Then…” An embarrassed look crossed his face, but he shut it down quickly. “Well, I started treating local livestock and pets. There aren’t that many people in this area, but there are enough. And they learned quickly enough that they could bring their animals to me if they needed treatment. This table hasn’t seen any real surgery, no. But it’s seen plenty of stitches. And more than one broken bone.”
He glanced at Angie, who was now laying on the table, very obviously controlling her breathing. “The good news is that I can treat you without any electricity. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. How do you feel about pain medication?”
“I feel like it might be the most brilliant thing mankind ever invented,” she said levelly, meeting his eyes. “Especially right now.”
He huffed out a laugh and nodded. “I don’t have anything as strong as what the hospitals might use, but I do have a good stock of Novocain and morphine. Stuff that I’m not supposed to have, of course. But old habits die hard. We should be able to make you comfortable for long enough to set the bone and get that wound stitched.”
He cast a frowning glance at the windows, then, and I followed his gaze. It was still bright white outside, the sunlight streaming in, but I could see that the color of the light had changed. It was starting to yellow.
“I just hope we can get it all done before the light fades too much,” he finished.
And at that, my mind finally caught on to his obsession with the light. I added that to his comment about not needing electricity to treat Angie—and his even earlier comment about having generators that only keep the house heated. Yeah, we were out in the middle of nowhere. Or at least I thought we were. But many of the houses, even this far out, had lines that ran to them. Lines that provided them with electricity.
So if this Marlon was so obsessed with doing things without electricity…
“Why is there no electricity out here?” I asked.
He looked up, his eyes intent, and I could see that he was judging me quickly. Trying to figure out how I was going to react. His gaze flew down to my chest, where my dog tags were lying on the borrowed shirt, and then back up to my eyes.
“So you don’t know,” he said. “I wondered how long you guys had been out there. Whether you knew what had happened.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Stop beating around the bush. We don’t know anything. What happened out there? Why don’t any of the lights work? Why didn’t my truck work when I tried to start it after Angie got hurt? What the hell was wrong with our phones?”
He pressed his lips together, but then nodded. “Nothing electronic will be working. Nothing that requires those electronic connections. Because this area—and, for all I know, the entire country, maybe the entire world—has experienced some sort of EMP event.”
“EMP event?” I asked breathlessly. Yeah, I’d thought that was what happened. That didn’t mean I’d actually believed it.
“Attack,” he corrected. “This was no accident. I don’t know who perpetrated it, or how far-reaching the effects are. But I can tell you that in Michigan, at the very least, we have been sent back into the Dark Ages. At least as far as electric components are concerned.”
11
After several moments of trying to get my brain to start moving again, I finally put two and two together.
“Wait,” I said slowly. “If there’s no electricity, it means there are no phones. No phone lines. No radio, no TV. How the hell do you know that’s what happened?”
Another long, heavy silence from Marlon, during which I could practically see the wheels in his brain turning. Finally, he shrugged.
“You’re military, and I’m guessing you’re Special Ops of some sort, given your behavior. So I’m also guessing that you’ll know enough to know not to question me when I say I can only give you so much information. The truth is, I have friends in high places—and ways to get in touch with them. So I know more than your average man in the woods might know. That doesn’t mean I know it all, and it certainly doesn’t mean I know what’s going to be done. Don’t know whether there’s even any plan for this sort of thing, though I suspect there must be, at some level. Beyond that…” He shrugged, giving me an open, honest look that told me he was telling me everything he knew—or at least that that was the story he was going to stick to.
“Right,” I breathed. More rapid recalculation in my head. More stopping and restarting of my brain. More pieces shifting on this big chess board we called life.
Because if I was right about what he was saying, then this Marlon guy was a whole lot more than someone who had once been a doctor and had for some reason retired out here in the middle of nowhere and started treating animals. If I was right about what I was thinking…
Then he was someone who had been in either the military or the government. Maybe even the intelligence community. He had friends who were still in, and they’d been able to give him information, either before everything went to hell or through secured—and non-electric?—channels right afterward.
I pushed my instincts out, trying to get a feel for the man and figure out whether I could trust him. Whether he might actually be telling me the truth. And I didn’t get any red flags. Instead, the guy had turned toward my wife and started carefully peeling the layers of her clothes away from her wound, stopping when he found cloth that had been caught up in scabs and was stuck.
He was leaving me to come to my own conclusions while he got started on the important thing: Angie. Smart. Efficient. Unemotional.
All of the things they’d taught us in the military.
I didn’t see any reason to distrust what he was saying. And if I was being smart, efficient, and unemotional, like I was supposed to be, I’d put all the questions away for another time.
I moved toward him, took up the bowl sitting next to his table, and looked up at him.
“Hot water? It’ll be the best and quickest way to get those scabs out of the way and get those jeans off.”
He nodded toward the sink that sat dead center in the counter in front of him, shoved up between rows and rows of cupboards. “The hot water tap will still be working. It’s hooked up to the generators as part of the heating system, so you’ll find the water plenty hot there. We don’t need much. Don’t waste it.”
I moved to the sink without answering and turned the hot water faucet. Seconds later, the sink was steaming with water that was indeed extremely hot, and I shoved the bowl under the faucet and let it fill halfway. Then I walked back to him, sloshing the water around to cool it as much as I could. One glance at Angie’s leg showed me a wide-open wound with fragments of bone visible.
She wasn’t going to thank us for touching that with hot water.
“Ready for your pain medication?” Marlon asked at that moment, as if he’d had the exact same thought as I did.
“I’ve been ready for hours,” she joked.
Marlon turned away to a cupboard and came back a moment later with several syringes. He held up one, then the others.
“Morphine,” he said with the first. “Lidocaine,” he said with the second two. “I’m going to give you quite a dose of morphine to control the overall pain, though I don’t have the equipment or the ability to put you out completely. I wouldn’t, regardless, because I wouldn’t be able to monitor your heart rate while you were asleep. Too dangerous. But I’m going to give you enough that I hope it will at least dull the pain. The lidocaine will numb the area around the wound. Extra insurance, you might say.”
I saw Angie pale for a moment, but then she gave him a brave nod. “Fair enough. Do whatever you can, Doc, and I’ll manage through the rest.”
He gave her an admiring look, and I moved to take her hand.
“I’ll be right here,” I whispered.
When she looked up, I saw nothing but trust and love in her eyes. “I know,” she whispered back. “Just make sure it’s quick, eh? I don’t think we’re going to have time to hang out and party here for long.”
I cracked a grin at that, then looked up at Marlon and nodded, giving him all the permission he needed to get started with this haphazard, done-by-daylight operation. I didn’t think it was going to be easy. But I agreed with Angie on one thing: It needed to be quick.
I hadn’t forgotten the men who would be coming after us.
The operation was done, Angie resting in semi-consciousness on the table. She’d done her best not to scream when we set her leg, but that hadn’t fooled anyone, and I thought Marlon and I both understood how much it had hurt her.
We’d worked as quickly as we could. And now her leg was set and her wounds cleaned and stitched.
“It’ll still take her awhile to heal,” he said quietly. “Months for the bone to knit, and that’s only if we can get her to a hospital where they can put her on the right medication to help her. But we got to her before any of the tissue died, and being out in the cold actually helped you. Stopped the bleeding, kept everything…well, alive,” he finished somewhat lamely.
He turned to start strapping the splint back onto her leg. We’d left that until last, wanting to give her a chance to recover. But we couldn’t afford to leave it off for too long. Her leg needed that support.
“You had this in your supplies?” he asked as he worked. “That was surprisingly thorough planning. What exactly were you planning to do out there in the woods?”
“Certainly not get attacked by a bear,” I replied. “It wasn’t ours. Belonged to a guy who strapped her up with it and then tried to kill me. Him and his cousins. Found out who Angie was and thought they could keep her for some sort of leverage with Ellis Woods. I didn’t exactly figure into that plan.”
Marlon frowned and looked up at me, pausing in his work. “How long ago did this happen?”
I tried to figure out how many days had passed. We’d slept one night at Randall’s cabin, and that was it. Then we’d left…and Marlon had found us, which brought us to this point. Had that only been last night that we slept at Randall’s? And this morning that I’d fought with him and his cousins? It seemed impossible, but it was also the only accounting I could come up with.
But that brought up an entirely different problem: How much information could I trust Marlon with? Yes, he was a stranger, and I wasn’t necessarily fond of those—especially after what had happened with Randall.
At the same time, my instincts were telling me that we could trust him. That he was friend rather than foe. That he was some sort of military—and that it made him a known entity. Even if he wasn’t actually. Those instincts hadn’t lied to me about what Randall and his cousins were up to. In fact, those instincts had saved our lives. Or at least mine. And I decided to trust them again right now.
“We were attacked yesterday,” I said. “The EMP, it made the animals in the woods go crazy and we tried to get back to our truck, to get the hell out of the forest and figure out what was going on. When we got to the truck, we found a bear in our supplies. Instead of getting scared off, it attacked us. I got Angie into the truck, but then it wouldn’t start. And the phones wouldn’t work. Finally decided that I had to strike out on foot. That was when we found a deserted cabin. Eventually this guy showed up, acting very weird but offering to help, and I knew we didn’t have any choice. When I overheard that he and his cousins were going to try to use Angie as leverage, though… Well, I wasn’t going to just sit around and let it happen.”
“Why would they try to use her as leverage?” he asked.
“She’s the niece of the mayor of Ellis Woods. Evidently they have a problem with the mayor. With the town. Thought they could use her to alleviate their problem.”
At this, Marlon’s face cleared. “This guy…did he look like an angry bear in human skin? Glowering? Dark?”
Angie shivered. “Sounds about right.”
It was right. That described Randall exactly. Which seemed odd—unless Marlon had also had some run-in with the man.
Marlon continued wrapping up Angie’s leg. “Did you find out his name? The man I’m thinking of is named Randall.”
I nodded and caught Angie doing the same. “That’s the man,” I said. “Evil son of a bitch.”
“Okay, well, then this would be the splint I put on his wife.”
Everything around me stopped. I’d seen that entire cabin, and I hadn’t seen anything that indicated there was a woman there. Or that there’d ever been a woman there. “He has a wife?”
“Had. She died on the table two days later from…something that should not have been in her system. A toxin. That was five years ago.”
He looked away, as though trying to escape the memory, and I exchanged a wide-eyed look with Angie. More and more curious.
Marlon finished strapping the splint back onto Angie’s leg and then looked up at me, his face deadly serious.
“John, mind if I have a word with you? Angie here is going to need to rest for a little while before we can move her. That was quite an ordeal.”
I cast a glance at my wife, saw that he was right about her needing the rest—her eyes were already drifting closed—and nodded. “Lead the way.”
A moment later, we were standing outside of the operating theater, on the other side of a not-quite-closed door. Marlon looked up at me with serious eyes.
“We’ve done the best we can for her, I’m afraid,” he started. “She won’t be able to walk. Or rather… She will, but it will be slow. Incredibly painful. Wherever you’re going, it won’t be quick unless you build her another sled. And even then, you’ll have to pull it, which will slow you down. There’s no way around that. If you’re planning to move on, that’s your option. I would offer you my truck, but as you can imagine, it’s out of commission. I don’t have any vehicle that actually works. Not right now.”
“I hadn’t expected any vehicle,” I assured him. “I knew that would be a long shot with the EMP. We’ll have to go on foot. We can’t stay here. We have a daughter in Ellis Woods—one that needs us. We have to move on as soon as Angie is able to go.”
Yes, it was a whole lot of information that he might not need. Yes, it might be dangerous to be telling him so much about us. But I needed help, and I was willing to use whatever I needed to get it. The guilt about our daughter might just be the thing that tipped the scales in terms of him giving us the aid we required.
In the military, one of the first things we’d been taught was the value of the exchange of information. I give you something you want, and you reciprocate. As it turned out, Marlon worked along those same lines.
He was nodding, his eyes narrowed as he thought through what I’d said. “There’s more. I didn’t tell you everything about the EMP back there because I didn’t want to frighten Angie when she’s already in such an unstable position. This EMP, from everything I heard before the lines went dead… John, it wasn’t just an EMP. It was
…is a solar storm as well. There was a short broadcast on emergency band radio, TV, and cell phones before it hit, and I heard more from my friends.”
I went cold. A solar storm? “I thought those took a while to get to Earth. And sun activity is monitored. We’d have advance notice.”
“We should have. Everyone who was watching the sun as it happened thought we’d have at least fifteen hours or more before it hit. But this was totally different. A bigger, faster blast wave than anything on record by far. Much bigger than the Carrington Event.”
“What’s that?”
“Huge solar storm in 1859. It fried the telegraph system in the U.S. and Europe, started a bunch of fires. They’ve known for years that we were due for another such event, but no one thought it would be this big. This one was unprecedented, a cluster of super flares followed by two CMEs. The huge solar event of 2012 could have been close to this bad, but it missed us. This one hit us dead on.”
I closed my eyes, too shocked to continue for a moment. Sarah. She was alone and didn’t know what was going on. Yes, she was with friends—friends that I trusted—but that didn’t mean she was safe.
“What about the nuclear EMP?” I finally asked.
He bit his lip. “That’s where it gets tricky. As far as I can tell, they happened at the exact same time. My best guess is that someone knew exactly when that solar storm was going to hit and did everything they could to hide it from the rest of the world, then detonated the nuclear EMP at exactly the right time to make what would already have been a catastrophic event even worse—and probably global.”
I let out a deep sigh, my mind frozen for a moment on the horror of it all. Then I took the next step. “But who? And why?”
He shook his head slowly. “I have the same questions. And if you’ve been high enough in the military, you know just as much as I do about the answers.”
Terrific. No problem. As if we didn’t already have enough to think about.
Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse Page 8