He’d never felt worse.
There was nothing to do but wait.
Wait until the next biker came.
6
Jessica
Jessica woke up from the blackness of what felt like a nightmare.
She opened her eyes. The world was gray and blurry.
What was going on?
For a moment, she was worried that she’d lost her mind. Or her memory. She knew who she was, and about the EMP, but that was about it.
She couldn’t remember what had happened. The last thing she could remember was that she’d been driving. Driving a strange kind of car. Like a van? A large van.
Then the memories of the RV came flooding back to her. She’d seen another car at the last minute and crashed right into it. And that’d been the last thing before she’d blacked out.
Jim was back at the pharmacy. They’d left him there. Rob had been unconscious.
Jessica had been driving. She’d crashed into something. Her vision had been damaged somehow.
Sure enough, her vision was still bad. One eye wouldn’t open, and something was partially wrong with the one that would.
Where were the others? And where was Jim?
She felt the ground with her hands. It was grass. Grass that was supposed to be there. Like a lawn. Not wild grass.
She stood up and looked around, trying to get a better look at her surroundings. There seemed to be a road near her. Or something like a road. Maybe a path. It was too blurry to tell.
There was no sign of the RV. Or the others.
“Aly!” she called out. “Rob!”
She tried again, and again, but there was no answer.
This didn’t make any sense. How could she have gotten separated from them? How had she wound up on her own, nowhere near the RV? She clearly remembered hitting the car in the road.
It was so frustrating that Jessica almost wanted to scream out. The logic just wasn’t there.
Did she have a head injury or something? Was her own thinking the problem, and she was just not intellectually capable of understanding the situation?
She doubted it. She tested herself, trying to remember the names of past US presidents, her birthday, the birthday of her parents. She passed her own tests fine. She could remember the names fine. Now she did some simple arithmetic. It all seemed to check out.
She felt OK. She didn’t seem to be injured besides her eye and her vision, and that was from the first crash, rather than the second.
So, working backwards, she figured that someone must have dragged her unconscious body from the RV. Whoever it’d been, they’d either dragged her far enough from the RV that she couldn’t see it now, or they’d dragged her only a short distance, and then driven off in the RV.
Who would have done that? Aly? Jessica doubted it. Unless there was some really crazy circumstance in which it had made sense. But what would that have been? Jessica couldn’t imagine Aly leaving her behind intentionally.
Had someone stolen the RV? After the crash, maybe they’d decided it was a better vehicle than their own, found Jessica unconscious, dragged her out of the RV, and driven off in it themselves.
That was a definite possibility.
But it didn’t explain why Jessica was alone, rather than with Rob and Aly.
Of course, there was the very real possibility that Rob was dead.
And Jessica supposed that she had to consider the possibility that Aly was dead as well.
But what kind of person would steal an RV and leave two alive or dead passengers inside it as they drove off? What was different about Jessica?
Then it hit her. It was obvious. She’d been the driver. Someone had needed to get into the driver’s seat in order to steal the RV. They hadn’t bothered with Aly and Rob because they were in the other seats.
Jessica was sure that’s what had happened.
And with that idea came two more important pieces of information. And that was that at the time of the accident, when the RV had been stolen, both Aly and Rob had been unconscious, or at least incapacitated enough not to be able to stop the thief. Either that or they’d been dead.
It also meant that Jessica was likely not far from the site of the accident.
Who knew? Maybe she’d been dumped out of the driver’s seat and she’d crawled in such a daze that she still didn’t remember to this grassy patch here.
She almost gasped when she realized she hadn’t checked to see if she was still armed. Her hands went to her holster.
Her gun was still there.
And there was a knife in her pocket.
But that was it.
No food. No water.
For a moment, she considered her possibilities as widely as she could. She could set off on her own, forgetting about her friends. If she were someone else, maybe that’s what she’d do. Maybe the possibilities of survival would be better in the long run, or maybe they’d be worse overall. She didn’t know.
But she’d grown attached to the others. She’d really been something of a loner. A very independent woman. That was before the EMP. The world changed, and Jessica had changed with it.
So she threw off that possibility.
She was going to try to find the others.
But the others were in different places. Did she go for Jim at the pharmacy, or Aly and Rob?
It was hard to know who was in the worse position.
And it was hard to know who had the greater chance of still being alive.
The outlooks were grim for both parties.
Jessica started walking before she’d made up her mind.
She found her way to the road, despite her blurry vision. She didn’t bother walking slowly because of her vision. Her strides were long and purposeful, and she held her gun at the ready, despite not being able to fully see her surroundings.
She made her way to the road. In one direction, she could almost see the outline of a building. Or something that might have been a building. That kind of made sense. She couldn’t have been that far from the crash site, which meant she wasn’t that far away from the pharmacy, or any of those strip mall-like stores that lined the road.
Jessica knew that she was a potential target, standing out in the open road by herself, unable to see any potential oncomers. After all, there were people out there, even if they weren’t always in sight.
She’d have to take the risk. She’d have to rely on her hearing. On the remaining vision that she did have.
There wasn’t time or need to mourn the partial loss of her sight. It might come back, anyway. Whatever the situation, it was the situation. She didn’t have the ability to change it. Just to make do with what she had.
She couldn’t see the sun, either because of the clouds or her vision. But she could see that off in one direction, the sky was much brighter.
Knowing the rough path of the sun as it rose and set throughout the day, hour by hour, Jessica was able to guess the cardinal directions. It was helpful to know north from south, since she couldn’t see well enough to identify any other landmarks.
She decided to walk towards the pharmacy for five minutes to see if she could find the site of the wreck. After all, it seemed likely that the vehicle she’d crashed into would still be there.
After that, she’d retrace her steps and go five minutes in the other direction. If she found the crash site, it might give her some more information about which of her friends to pursue. Hopefully, she didn’t find the body of Aly or Rob.
Or both.
“Hey, lady!”
It was someone’s voice.
It was such a surprise that Jessica’s heart started to pound.
Jessica snapped her head around, looking for the source of the voice.
But everything was just a blur. There was that building off in the distance, a blurry backdrop with nothing but smaller blurs in front of it.
“Hey, lady, watch where you’re going!”
This time, Jessica was able to tell that the
voice was coming from off to her right. She spun around, pointing her gun.
“Whoa! Don’t shoot! I’m just trying to help.”
Each time she heard the voice, she was getting a better read on the person. It was definitely a woman’s voice.
So she was pointing in the right direction.
“I’ve got you right where I want you,” said Jessica, using her most ruthless tone.
The sound of her own voice surprised her. It sounded gravely and hoarse. Maybe an effect of the crash.
She was trying to fake out this new threat.
The only problem?
Whoever this person was, they’d be able to tell easily enough whether Jessica’s gun was actually pointed at them or not. Whereas Jessica couldn’t.
It wasn’t a great situation.
But there were certainly worse.
7
Aly
Things couldn’t have been going worse.
So many things had happened in the last few minutes that Aly’s mind was reeling. Her pulse had skyrocketed upwards. Her body was full of adrenaline.
She felt like she had to do something. But she felt like there was nothing to do.
She felt useless. Completely powerless.
And it wasn’t because she was physically incapable.
It was just fear holding her back.
Fear. And nothing more. Just that cold sensation that seemed to twist her stomach and guts up into knots. And it felt like an icicle had penetrated her chest, where her heart and courage used to be.
The body sensation seemed significant to her, as if she’d lost her courage, as if she’d lost what had made her her.
Of course, she knew that the sensations were just the result of the hormones her body was pumping out as it attempted to deal with the intensity of the situation. Her body was flooding her with substances that kept her alert, that diverted energy away from the less “crucial” body parts, and that made her want to act.
Fight or flight. That was what it was all about.
She knew she wanted to flee. She wasn’t a good fighter.
But she couldn’t flee without fighting. Not in this case.
Aly was in the backseat of the RV. The same RV that Jessica, apparently underestimating the extent of her blindness, had crashed.
Someone else was driving the RV now. It was the driver of the car that Jessica had crashed into and totaled.
Somehow, the RV still ran.
Not that it was running well.
There were horrible noises coming from the engine, and from underneath the RV. Aly didn’t know how long the RV would keep going. It was shaking and vibrating like it never had before the crash.
Something had to give.
Rob, as far as Aly could tell, hadn’t moved a muscle since the crash. He was still in the passenger seat. The new driver probably thought Rob was dead. And for all Aly knew, Rob was dead.
But she didn’t want to count her nightmares before they hatched. She’d have to worry about Rob once she figured out what the hell she was going to do.
Aly ran through a mental list of the others.
They’d left her husband back at the pharmacy.
There was every chance in the world that he was dead. Or about to die. Or being tortured to death in some horrible manner. Or fighting for his life. Alone. They’d left him alone. Even if they couldn’t have helped him, they should have stayed.
Aly’d never forgive herself for leaving her husband like that. His last moments would be horrible. And, most importantly, completely alone. Look what good it had done. They hadn’t saved themselves. Likely, Jim would die alone. And then Aly would die alone. And Jessica would die alone.
And then they’d all be dead. Without even the satisfaction of having stuck it out together to the very end. They wouldn’t be looking each other in the eyes with some kind of deeper awareness. She wouldn’t be reaching out and touching Jim’s hand one last time before it was all over.
No, it would all just end. And that’d be it.
Did it really matter, though? Maybe she was looking at it the wrong way. Maybe the end had come long ago. Maybe the end wasn’t something that would come in five or ten minutes, whenever Aly got the courage to do something, to try to get out of this death trap of an RV. Maybe the end had come as soon as the power had gone out. Not really, of course. But in a sense, it was true. That moment the power had gone out, the moment the EMP had hit and the systems had all gone offline, their fates had been sealed.
Aly’s mind shifted to Jessica, who was out there, somewhere, alone and apparently blind. Or almost blind.
Who knew what would happen to her?
What Aly did know was that it was all her own fault. Aly had watched as the new RV driver had simply opened the door and shoved Jessica’s limp body out of the RV before driving away.
The only reason that Aly knew Jessica wasn’t dead was because she’d seen Jessica’s body make some kind of involuntarily automatic movement when she’d hit the ground. Dead people didn’t do that.
But then again, just because Jessica had been alive then didn’t mean she was alive now. For all Aly knew, Jessica had suffered massive internal injuries during the crash and would bleed to death in the next few minutes, never waking up again.
Aly’s mind had reached some kind of apex now of complete terror and anxiety.
She’d always had anxiety before the EMP. It’d been a problem. Fairly often, too. But she’d been able to deal with it. She’d been able to fight through it.
This was something new.
This was something different.
And Jim wasn’t there.
He’d been there. All through the EMP. Since he’d rescued her from that dark hellhole of a prison.
He’d always known what to do.
He’d always had the answer.
Now she was completely and utterly alone.
With only one option.
The RV was vibrating even more intensely now. From where Aly lay, hidden back behind the driver’s seat, pressed up against the upholstery, she could look up and out the windows, at the trees that passed by as the driver pushed the RV’s engine to the absolute limits of its capabilities.
The noise from the engine was horrific. It seemed to pierce her ears. Her skull.
Her brain felt as if it were on fire, just from that sound. She’d never heard anything like it.
The highest pitched whine she could have imagined. Or even worse.
Aside from that noise, and the chaos in her mind, Aly could almost imagine that everything was OK. After all, the trees that were rushing past looked normal. They stretched towards the sky as they always had. The EMP hadn’t changed them. And if the EMP had never happened, and Aly had happened to be driving down this very same road in a car, those trees would have looked exactly the same. Every little mark and every branch and every tree would have been no different, despite the violent chaos that was ripping human civilization apart from the core.
Aly shook the thoughts out of her head. Literally.
They were useless. They weren’t helping her survive.
And if she wasn’t careful, she’d simply lose herself to her own mind, lost somewhere in fear and fantasy, as her mind desperately tried to escape the physical reality of the situation in any way it could.
Aly tried to pull herself back to reality.
Back to the present.
She tried to trick herself. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter what Jim and Jessica were up to. It didn’t matter whether Rob was alive or dead.
Sure, it mattered. But Aly couldn’t do anything right now about their situations. So, in a sense, their situations shouldn’t matter to her because she couldn’t change them. She just had to accept all the possibilities and ignore them all.
She just had to act.
She was going to do what Jim would have done.
Take stock of the situation.
Rob obviously wasn’t of any help. Better to just assume
he was dead.
Aly herself wasn’t hurt. She had no gun. She didn’t know where it was. Something had happened to it in one of the crashes.
And she had no knife either.
And no matter how desperately she moved her eyes around, she couldn’t spot anything resembling a weapon. No gun, no knife, no baseball bats or rope. Absolutely nothing.
Nothing but her bare hands.
And who was she up against?
The driver didn’t appear to be especially dangerous or frightening. He wasn’t an obvious member of a biker gang. He wasn’t even obviously armed.
But of course, his innocuous appearance was what frightened Aly so much.
When she’d seen him get into the RV and so calmly deposit Jessica’s unconscious body onto the ground, he’d looked indistinguishable from a man who’d been commuting to work before the EMP.
Unless Aly’s mind had been playing tricks on her, he’d been wearing slacks and a button-down shirt with a checkered pattern.
His clothes hadn’t appeared wrinkled. Not in the least bit. In fact, she was almost positive that there’d been a crease running down the front of his khakis.
His hair had been combed. Modern style with just a little bit of gel to keep it in place.
It really made so little sense that Aly assumed she’d been hallucinating. Or partially hallucinating.
How could someone still look like they were on their way to work, so long after the EMP?
It was almost impossible.
Aly herself looked nothing like her former self. She wore no makeup now, unless by mistake there were the remnants of something she’d applied weeks ago. Something that hadn’t washed off in the blood, sweat, tears. Not to mention water. Her clothes were torn and filthy. Above all else, she stunk. She stunk so badly, and she had for so long, that she wasn’t even aware of her own scent.
But she knew she stunk.
After all, she was the kind of filthy that you had to experience to understand.
It wasn’t the kind of filthy that they showed in the movies, where the makeup artist had spent hours skillfully applying just the right amount of dirt, grime, and blood on the actors, keeping them looking screen-worthy yet rugged.
Final Dread: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (Surviving Book 3) Page 5