Nuclear Winter Whiteout

by Bobby Akart

  They decided to renew their search for sources to replenish their spent gas cans during the daytime. As Tucker recognized, at night, the farms or businesses they approached would hear and see them coming before they began their search. It would make them ripe for an ambush.

  During their travels, they talked about Owen. They cried. They laughed. They reminisced. They patted each other on the back for their determination to get home to Driftwood Key.

  They also recalled the conversations they’d had with Owen before their debacle east of Pueblo. They’d dreamed up as many scenarios as their creative minds could imagine that would result in trouble along the way. Every one of their concerns revolved around conflict with their fellow man.

  After a decent night’s rest, during which Lacey stretched out in the back seat and Tucker curled up in the front, they awoke before dawn and hit the road. A light dusting of snow had coated their truck, and the roads were somewhat slick as they made their way toward Interstate 20, an east-west route that would take them across the Mississippi River near Vicksburg.

  They were about to turn up the on-ramp in Cheniere, Arkansas, when Tucker slapped the dashboard and pointed ahead.

  “Mom, the entrance is blocked by those military Humvees. Keep going straight.”

  “But we need to cross the river at Vicksburg,” she argued and kept going. She drove up to the National Guardsmen, who approached their vehicle with their weapons at low ready. They were studying Lacey and Tucker through the windshield as they approached.

  Lacey rolled her window down and spoke to them before they arrived. “We need to get to Vicksburg.”

  “Not this way, ma’am,” the man gruffly replied. “All lanes are closed to civilian traffic.”

  Lacey looked ahead and then to her left to observe the highway. “I don’t see any traffic at all.”

  “It’s coming, ma’am. Now, back down the ramp and move along.”

  “Well, when can we cross the bridge?”

  The soldier shook his head and glanced over at his partner. He was wearing a shemagh around his mouth and nose, so Lacey could only see his eyes.

  “Move back, lady!” the other soldier shouted, growing impatient with Lacey’s questioning. “We have the authority to confiscate this vehicle and everything within it per the president’s martial law declaration. We’ve got better things to do, but if you insist …” He purposefully let his last few words dangle in the air as he raised his automatic weapon in Tucker’s direction.

  “Mom, we should go.”

  Lacey didn’t bother to roll up her window. She glanced in her side mirrors to ensure nobody was parked behind her before slowly easing down the ramp. Tucker never took his eyes off the soldiers. He was still gripping the pistol he’d retrieved from the glove box as the men first approached the truck.

  Lacey continued south through the country roads that ran parallel to the Mississippi River. The next available crossing was U.S. Highway 425 at Natchez, Mississippi. This was not a route they’d mapped out that morning, and the first comment Tucker made related to the waste of gasoline.

  Lacey drove slower than she had prior to this point in an effort to conserve fuel and to watch for opportunities to obtain more. While they thought they might have enough to get into Central Florida, if not farther, they were constantly on the lookout. This unexpected detour gave them a greater sense of urgency to fill up.

  U.S. Highway 84 turned into Route 425, where it began to run along the banks of the Mississippi. It also took them through a series of small communities as they approached Vidalia, Louisiana. There was more traffic and quite a few people milling about on the side of the road. Lacey was beginning to feel uneasy, as those without transportation had the distinct look of envy on their faces as they scowled at the moving vehicles.

  They entered the small town of Vidalia, perched on the west side of the Mississippi. The closer they got to the bridge, the more traffic built up in front of them.

  Tucker rolled down his window and tried to see ahead. The hazy conditions restricted visibility to less than a mile. All he could see was a single lane of taillights.

  Tucker was surprised at what he saw. “A traffic jam? Seriously?”

  “Nobody is coming off the bridge in our direction. Are they all headed east?” Lacey asked.

  Tucker looked around, and then he suddenly opened his door. “I’ll be right back.”

  Before Lacey could ask where he was going, he’d exited the vehicle and bounded across the parking lot to the overhang of the Craws, Claws & Tails patio restaurant. He spoke with a group of teenagers and a couple of older men sitting in rocking chairs underneath the sloped roof overhang. He looked back at their truck several times to see if Lacey had advanced any. She had not. Tucker bumped fists with the young men, and he ran back to the truck.

  After he was back in the truck, he pointed to his right at a small residential street that ran next to the restaurant. “Mom, take a right here. We can’t cross the bridge.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re confiscating gasoline and weapons on the other side. The Mississippi governor, acting on the president’s orders, is searching every vehicle that enters. The martial law declaration allows them to take our guns, ammo, and stored gasoline, leaving us only what’s in the tanks.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” shouted Lacey in disbelief. She wheeled the Bronco across the parking lot, where Tucker waved to the group, who gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Take a left up ahead and then an immediate right. These county roads drive along the river and will take us to a small town called New Roads. Supposedly the highway is open to cross there since both sides of the river are in Louisiana.”

  “It still leads us into Mississippi, right?” asked Lacey although she knew the answer to her question. “We’re just gonna run into the same problem.”

  “Eventually, yes. According to those guys, the bridge is open. The next crossings are in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which are unsafe. They said New Orleans is on fire.”

  “Whadya mean?”

  Tucker raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly. “I mean they said the city is on fire. People are killing each other in the streets. One of the old men said the cops and National Guard won’t even go in there.”

  Lacey shook her head. This meant they had one shot to get across the Mississippi without giving up everything they needed to get to the Keys. She was growing weary of the constant threats and uncertainty. She took a deep breath. Then she got a firm grip on the wheel as well as herself.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Tuesday, November 5

  Driftwood Key

  Dress for success were the words Patrick Hollister’s father had ingrained in him growing up. When he entered the banking world, he was always impeccably dressed in custom-tailored suits and Italian shoes. While most of the professional world in the Florida Keys adopted a laid-back appearance, Patrick’s pride in himself prevented him from lowering the standards his father had taught him.

  He studied himself in the mirror, and the person who stared back was hardly recognizable. He hadn’t shaved in more than a week, resulting in a shaggy beard that certainly hadn’t adorned his face since the day he was born. Likewise, his hair was long and unkept.

  The clothing had been given to him by Hank out of his musty closet. Hank was the type of man to keep those unworn size thirty-six jeans he’d bought online many years ago for when he lost a few pounds. Of course, that never happened, and the size forty waistline meant the jeans remained new-with-tag, as they say on eBay.

  The long-sleeve sweatshirt with the Driftwood Key Inn logo was ironic. Patrick had every intention of becoming a part of the operation here. In fact, the title of sole proprietor seemed to suit him just fine.

  So, with a final adjustment of his sweatshirt and a half-hearted attempt to straighten his hair, Patrick emerged from bungalow three to take a little tour of the grounds.

  He was somewhat familiar with the twenty-nine acres that mad
e up Driftwood Key from his prior visits to Hank years ago. When he’d first solicited the Albrights’ business, he did his homework. He studied the property assessor’s records online and then viewed images posted on Google by guests or the hotel staff. As a banker, when he set his sights on a prospective business client, he made the extra effort to learn all he could about their operation in order to impress them in some small way.

  He didn’t earn Hank Albright’s business on that day, but it certainly benefitted him on the day he planned on taking it away from him.

  Patrick stepped onto the sugary white sand of Driftwood Key. It was cold. Until now, he’d played up his recovery by remaining inside the bungalow or on the porch. He moaned and groaned when he moved in their presence. He’d winced so many times he wondered if he’d need Botox after this was over. If Botox was still a thing someday.

  However, Patrick saw the handwriting on the wall. They were ready for him to leave. He’d worn out his welcome to the point they were getting suspicious. Truth be told, he was ready to live again. He was tired of the bedridden days and nights filled with an insatiable hunger to kill.

  It was time.

  Throughout his time in the bungalow, he tried to watch everyone’s movements through the windows. He had a clear view of the drive connecting the front gate and the main house. He eavesdropped on their conversations when he sat on the front porch. He engaged in casual conversation with Jessica and Phoebe, especially, when they came to tend to his wounds or feed him.

  For the last several days in particular, they all used a sneaky ploy that didn’t work with the man who’d mastered deception. Small talk was generally followed by pointed questions as to how Patrick had suffered his injuries. Patrick was interested in small talk, so he did everything he could to extend the casual discussions. He was gathering information while his adversaries were setting him up to extract theirs. It was a game of mental chess that he was winning easily.

  Their routine had changed in the last day or so. He’d overheard that Jimmy, his favorite, had been pulled away to work for the sheriff’s department. The poor boy must be exhausted, Patrick had thought to himself the night before as he fell asleep. Eight hours away. Eight hours doing chores and fishing. More hours on patrol with a few hours of sleep a day.

  Then there was Jessica. She was pulling double duty outside Driftwood Key. She was gone most of the afternoon and didn’t return until close to midnight. On more than one occasion, her truck pulled in as Detective Mikey’s pulled out.

  Sonny spent his days in his precious greenhouses, doting over their vegetables after a long night of patrolling the grounds and manning the gate. He’d disappear to sleep, presumably from late afternoon through the early evening until around eleven. Phoebe was tethered to the kitchen. When she wasn’t planning and preparing meals for everyone, she was constantly checking their supply inventory. The woman was borderline obsessive-compulsive about all of that stuff. However, Patrick thought, she’d be his first hire if he were staffing the inn. Unfortunately, on this day, she’d be the first fire.

  Patrick turned his attention toward the soon-to-be-former-sole-proprietor of Driftwood Key, Mr. Hank. Even in Patrick’s mind, he managed to say the words sarcastically. He found it so annoying that the Frees referred to him as Mr. Hank. C’mon, people! It’s Hank. Or Mr. Albright. Or boss. Or sir. Or something other than some plantation-speak like Mr. Hank.

  Regardless, good old Hank had to go; otherwise a new sole proprietor couldn’t be anointed.

  So Patrick began to wander the grounds of Driftwood Key. He came across one or two of them throughout the day, and they were cordial while keeping their distance. He knew what they wanted—a healthy enough patient capable of hitting the road and going home. He was going to raise their hopes while laying the groundwork to have one helluva party that night.

  For hours, with only an occasional stop to take a rest, Patrick took mental inventory of the main buildings and their locations. He began to lay out a time frame to make his move.

  Phoebe fed him like clockwork around six every evening. She tended to stick to the house after dark, she’d told him. Sonny ate early and went to bed to get some sleep before the graveyard shift. Then she fed Patrick.

  His dinners were delivered on a bamboo tray complete with plastic utensils, of course, befitting any inmate. You must feed your prisoners, but you certainly don’t give them a knife and fork, right? Patrick laughed when he analyzed this part of his daily routine. Clearly, someone at Driftwood Key had watched Silence of the Lambs.

  After the meals were served, Hank, Jessica, and Mike would gather by a bonfire next to the water’s edge. Sometimes they’d drink, and their conversations varied. In the dead calm of the post-apocalyptic world, oceanfront edition, their voices carried, and Patrick made a point to settle in on the bungalow’s porch to listen. Jessica didn’t always join the guys because she was still working. With a little luck, she’d be off saving lives while Patrick was drumming up some business for her back at home.

  Jimmy hadn’t been home at the evening hour for days, so he wasn’t likely to get in the way. With a little luck in terms of timing, Patrick could dispose of the others and Jessica, upon her return, leaving Jimmy all alone.

  As Patrick wandered, so did his mind. He thought of all the ways he’d killed in the past. He considered himself a versatile and imaginative serial killer. Guns would be easy. He laughed at this as he saw Hank walking along the water’s edge with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Everyone wanted to do away with guns. Gimme a knife and I’ll show you how to kill. Better yet, I wonder if Sonny has a cordless Sawzall he’d be willing to loan me for a few hours.

  He tried to enter the toolshed and found that the paranoid Sonny had double padlocked it. Patrick grabbed the chain and gave it an angry shake before moving on to the greenhouses. He walked through, stopping periodically to examine a hand trowel or a three-pronged weeder. He took the weeder and raised it over his head, slamming it downward into the two-by-four surround of a planting bed.

  “Dull,” he muttered as he tossed it into the tomato plants. “Don’t you people have a hatchet? How do you split open your coconuts?”

  Frustrated, Patrick continued to roam the grounds in search of a weapon. Anything that was capable of piercing skin or crushing a skull would do. After a few hours, he became concerned he was drawing suspicion, so he made his way back to his bungalow without a killing tool. He’d have to come up with a plan B. Or, better yet, fall back on his instincts that had served him well those many nights sitting on a bar stool, waiting for his next victim.

  Chapter Fifty

  Tuesday, November 5

  New Roads, Louisiana

  Lacey and Tucker rode mostly in silence as they mindlessly traveled south along the side of the Mississippi River lowlands. They’d begun to lose their focus and were tiring of the trip although they still had over nine hundred miles to travel. Tucker had tried to cheerily look on the bright side that they were more than halfway to Driftwood Key, but both of them recognized the challenges were becoming more frequent.

  They passed through the small riverfront town of New Roads, Louisiana, without incident. The old Bronco chugged up the John James Audubon Bridge, a two-mile-long crossing that rose to five hundred feet above the Mississippi River.

  As they drove up the fairly steep slope, more of their surroundings came into view. To their left sat the Big Cajun 2 Power Plant, a fifteen-hundred-megawatt gas and coal-fired power plant along the Mississippi. Louisiana’s first coal-fired station, it now appeared to be nothing more than skeletal remains as it sat dormant below them. The power station relied upon power to generate more electricity for the region. In order to function, computers were required to monitor and control the process. When the cascading failure of the Eastern and Western Interconnection occurred, it took Big Cajun 2 down with it. It would sit empty and useless for nearly a decade as it waited for replacement parts necessary for its operation.

  At the top of the b
ridge span, Lacey slowed their progress to take in the view. They were shocked as they realized they were barely able to see the river. At five hundred feet above ground, they were immersed in the gray, ashen clouds of soot that hung over the earth. It prevented them from seeing into the distance, which meant they’d be driving blind into the lowlands on the other side of the river. If there were roadblocks ahead, they wouldn’t know until they were on top of them.

  “We’re committed now,” said Lacey as she caught Tucker’s look of apprehension. He obviously shared her concerns by the way he gripped the rifle he’d pulled out of the back seat before entering New Roads.

  “I know, Mom. We’re stuck on this road for a few miles, and then we pick up Highway 61. We’ll be changing roads a lot until we get to Florida unless you wanna chance getting on I-10.”

  “Too much traffic. We’ve only got a few hours of daylight left, so let’s keep rolling.”

  “I can drive,” Tucker offered.

  “Let’s wait until dark. Your eyesight is better than mine right now. My vision has been getting blurry at the end of the day since I woke up.”

  Tucker understood. His mom had been injured more by the flash freeze than he was. He was amazed that she hadn’t experienced more issues during the two long days of traveling.

  Their drive through the back country of Eastern Louisiana was relaxing. They both began to feel better about their prospects of getting to the Keys by the next evening. Tucker vowed to drive late into the night. By his calculations, they could make it to beyond Tallahassee by midnight, maybe even to Lake City in north-central Florida.