That was the last thought on her mind as she fell asleep. She thought of Joyce’s father, a man she’d only ever met once, a man she only knew as Mr. Bates, a man that was now relying on her to somehow keep his daughter alive.
***
She awoke to the sound of soft, treading footsteps. She opened her eyes and saw the back of Joyce’s head. According to the lack of light coming through window, it was still night. The footsteps, of course, were coming from behind her. She was afraid to turnaround, sure that if she did she would find the camper door open and a stranger coming towards her. That stranger would have already killed Paul and now had his eyes on her and Joyce…
“Paul?” she asked softly before her paranoid thoughts could get away from her.
“Yeah, it’s just me. Go back to sleep.”
Olivia rolled over to face him. He had a gun in his hand, though the Glock was still sitting on the table. This new one must have been the one he’d kept in his bag. “Where are you going?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he answered. “And it then occurred to me that we have all of these cars around us—cars with radios. I’m sure most of the local FM stations are off the air, just like the TV stations. But if I can find an AM news station, I could maybe get a better idea of what happened today. Because without those answers, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to sleep.”
Olivia was still incredibly tired, but this idea appealed to her. She looked to her watch and saw that it was 2:52 a.m. “You going to try the truck?”
“Yeah.”
She got up and stretched. Her legs and arms felt much better but her back was tight and sore. “I’m coming, then. But if you have to go any farther than the truck, I’m staying here with Joyce.”
They exited the camper together, Paul holding the door and making sure not to make any sounds that were too loud. When they were back on the pavement of the bridge, Olivia thought the world sounded even quieter than it had when they’d first come across the camper about four and a half hours ago. She glanced back to the camper door, not liking the idea that Joyce might wake up at any moment to find herself in a strange place with no one else around.
Paul was already heading to the driver’s side. He opened the door with an odd sort of respect and looked inside. The overhead light came on and though Olivia knew it was a small and rather insignificant bulb, it was almost like a lighthouse had come to life in the darkness.
“Is it bad in there?” Olivia asked.
“Not too bad. The wife got sick in the truck. There’s some puke in the floorboard and it doesn’t smell the best. But compared to some of the other stuff we’ve seen, it’s nothing.”
Olivia joined him at the driver’s side door as he leaned in. With the care a doctor might show a patient that died on his table, Paul gently pushed the driver over beside his dead wife. His head slumped a bit, resting on her shoulder. In a morbid sort of way, Olivia found it quite sweet.
Paul got up into the truck, sitting on the edge and leaning over to the ignition. He turned it over to the accessory position. There were a few dings from the door being opened, but that was it. Ignoring them, Paul took a look at the radio. Olivia peered inside and caught a glimpse of the dashboard and radio. It was a newer radio, built for Bluetooth and other innovations but, like any car audio system, had easy to find and control radio capabilities.
“Funny, huh?” Paul said. “We took all that time to break into the camper and the keys were right here all along. I’d like to think I would have thought of such a thing if the circumstances weren’t so crazy.”
Paul tinkered with the radio for a bit, switching the system to radio, and then to the AM frequency. He had the volume low, but the telltale squalls and screeches of AM static seemed to slice right through Olivia’s brain. She shuddered, hugging herself as Paul scanned for a station. When he finally found one, the monotone male voice coming out of the truck was like a ghost speaking to them from some distant memory—not just because of the so-so reception, but because of the broken emotion in his voice.
“…as we know, there are no news outlets in the nation showing the drone and other aerial footage coming out of New York City,” the man said. “People are putting the footage on YouTube and it is being taken down almost right away. There are those that might say this is evidence of some sort of a coverup but as the President said this afternoon, such measures need to be taken to ensure the country does not break out into mass panic. Now, we are taking your calls but I’ll continue to warn you: anything that is clearly outright misinformation or any attempt to skewer a political party will not be tolerated. With that in mind, we’ll take the next caller—Jimmy, out of Hartford, Connecticut. Jimmy, what’s on your mind?”
“First of all, no matter what the news is saying, this mess is in Hartford,” Jimmy from Hartford said. “The military is here, in the streets. They are making sure no one comes out of their homes while also trying to reign in the mass exodus of people that are trying to get out of the city. I haven’t seen it happen, but I’ve heard gunshots. Not one or two but a steady stream of automatic rifles.”
“Any idea how bad it is there in Hartford, Jimmy?”
“No. But I know both of my neighbors caught this thing and they’re dead. I have a Facebook friend that posted a video of a street about five blocks over…and there were ambulances being swarmed by sick people. People throwing up right on the streets, in their yards, and you could tell the ambulance drivers and the medics were just clueless.”
“Okay, Jimmy,” the host said, his voice wavering. “Thanks for that update. We do wish you well, but we’ve got to get more people on the line. I’m being told for about the hundredth time that the airwaves are being monitored for this sort of conversation so we want to get as many opinions and voices out there as possible. So, next on the line, we’ve got Sherry out of Columbus, Ohio—Sherry, don’t tell me it’s in Ohio, too…”
“No, not yet. Not that I know of, anyway. And I’d know because I’m a nurse at Mercy Medical Center. There may be no cases here yet, but we know it’s coming. We’ve been instructed to free up as many rooms as possible. We know it’s in Pennsylvania. As of about an hour ago, we got word that Pittsburgh is going the way of New York City and there’s no stopping it. We know it’s coming here, we know we can’t do anything about it and we…we just…”
Sherry from Columbus broke down into tears at this and the host let her have her moment of grief, uninterrupted. “Sherry,” he said, after several moments, “thank you for your update. Godspeed to you, and many prayers. Next on the line we have—”
Paul switched the channel again. It took about fifteen seconds for him to find another station. Neither he nor Olivia spoke the entire time. Olivia had chills despite the comfortable summer temperatures of a clear night at three in the morning. The chills only increased when another drone-like voice broke through the static and continued to paint a picture of what had happened. Idly, she wondered if there was some sort of requirement that anyone broadcasting on an AM station had to have the somber tones of a preacher.
“…unable to gather any data out of cases in New York,” this older-sounding man was saying. “The little bit of information we have is coming from a community healthcare facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania where the first cases of the illness were reported around eight o’clock tonight. Here’s what we know about the virus, currently being referred to in online communities as the Blood Fire Virus due to the rapid growth of fever in the infected. As of right now, even doctors and researchers are going by the term Blood Fire Virus because no one has yet been able to nail down any existing virus it may have evolved from. This of course leads many to speculate that the virus is man-made and was perhaps intentionally set loose on the US by another country. There is no proof of this, though reports from the White House insist that the matter is being rigorously investigated.
“While the countless teams currently working to better understand the virus have not been able to properly identify it, e
arly reports out of Scranton are suggesting it has the genetic make-up of a basic norovirus, but also shows characteristics of the Marburg Virus. One doctor out of New York said early on that the way the virus presents itself reminds him of, and I quote, ‘Dengue Fever, but on steroids.’ None of these findings have been confirmed of course, because as soon as someone catches the Blood Fire Virus, they are typically dead within an hour. So far, based on everything we’ve seen out of New York and the smaller towns the virus has absolutely wiped out, there seems to be no hope of survival until we get a better understanding of—”
“No more,” Olivia croaked. “Please, turn it off…”
Paul sat up and turned the key back to the off position. The overhead bulb went off and they were back in darkness again. Olivia felt like crying but her body refused to do so. Her body wanted to get back to rest—to get back to Joyce and make sure she was okay.
She walked back to the camper among the shapes of cars that would likely never move again. She pictured these cars stuck on this bridge forever—until an asteroid struck the earth or until the sun exploded billions of years down the line. It was eerie, and it caused her to open the door to the camper quickly.
When she fell back in beside Joyce, she heard Paul come in behind her. He said nothing, settling back down on the kitchen bench in another effort to try to sleep. Listening to him move in the darkness, Olivia thought about the doctors in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She thought of how quickly this virus—this Blood Fire Virus—had wiped out New York and how soon it had crossed over into other states. If it was in Pennsylvania, surely it had also already made its way into and through New Jersey.
An overwhelming feeling of defeat crept into her. If this was all there was waiting for them in New Jersey, would it be this way in other states? Would they cross this bridge tomorrow and find that while they slept, the rest of the world had also gone to waste—that Joyce would have no father or future to hope for?
It took Olivia a very long time to fall back to sleep, and when she did she could still hear the voice of the last newscaster, telling her the world was ending through the hiss and pop of AM radio static.
Chapter 18
Terrence woke up from a nightmare with a scream lodged in his throat. Had it been a new nightmare, he may have screamed uncontrollably, certain that his life was about to end. But this was one he’d been having for the better part of eight years, ever since he’d been removed from his position with Homeland Security. By the time he opened his eyes and the terror had passed through him, he knew it was a dream. Still, it took a while to get his heartbeat under control and to steady his breathing. He lay there for a moment, cycling back through the dream and wondering what he could have done differently all those years ago.
Some may have claimed he was a prophet, as the dream had more or less predicted the future. Only, in his dream it was not New York that was being torn apart by a biological threat, but Los Angeles. Though Terrence had never been to L.A., he was there in the nightmare, standing in the center of what his mind imagined a busy Los Angles street might look like. People were lying dead in the street; in his nightmare, everyone had died from some sort of disease that had formed blisters and pustules on the skin. He was standing in the middle of piles and piles of the dead, so destroyed by the sickness that they no longer resembled humans but monstrous mutants.
His wife was on the street across from him, holding the hand of their ten year-old son, screaming at him. Their faces were red and blistered; one blister covered most of his son’s right eye.
“You knew!” the woman that had once proudly been Meredith Crowder screamed. “You knew this would happen and if you tried harder, you could have—
But then the blast came—a blast that dwarfed all atomic blasts he had ever imagined. He watched Mary and Trevor, his son, wilt away like dust, pushed by the fire and wind, and that’s when he woke up. Every single time, he watched them die in the flames and then he’d wake up just as his own skin started to singe.
With the imagery of Meredith and Trevor’s wilting bodies in mind, Terrence sat up on the small cot. The bunker was lit only by the pulsing blue lights of the modem on the table at the other end of the room. He blindly reached to the edge of the bed for his cellphone, tapped the screen, and saw that it was 6:11 in the morning.
Trevor, he thought. Trevor would be eighteen now, but Terrence had not seen him in over three years. He’d been ten when Meredith left, after things with Homeland Security went bad. Trevor had not…
Ah crap, Terrence thought.
“I left it,” he said out loud. “I left the damned necklace.”
The necklace in question was the last gift Trevor had ever given him. It had been made out of a seashell and a length of thin chain off of a novelty keyring. It had barely fit around his neck so he’d had it lengthened without Trevor knowing it, and he’d worn it without fail up until Meredith had walked away. Terrence had tried wearing it after his wife and son had left him, but it had been too painful.
So why was the thought of leaving it behind breaking his heart? Why was he worried about a cheap necklace above all else on a morning where the world was ending? Hell, he didn’t even know how bad things were now—how much things had escalated along the East Coast while he’d been sleeping. Surely it wasn’t in Baltimore yet, right? Was it that fast?
It’s just a stupid necklace, the survivor in him thought. Put it out of your mind and wait.
But then the part of him that had once been an exceptional father spoke up. And when it did, it was like a boot to the head. You coward, that part of him said. Get to that house and get that necklace. Get the only remaining thing you have to remember your son by.
It had him moving so quickly that he didn’t even bother checking his little control center to see what the morning news was looking like. A mile and a half up, a mile and a half back. He’d be back to the bunker in less than an hour and then he could see how much more of the country had been decimated.
Before leaving, he got only one thing to take with him: an N95 respirator mask that he took out of his single duffle bag of clothing. He strapped it on, reached up along the ceiling, and pulled the ladder down. Faint morning light crept down into the bunker, accompanied by fresh air. He squinted his eyes against the light as he climbed out, very aware of the sound of his compressed breathing in the mask.
He walked across the field and came to the dirt track. The morning was quiet, causing his constrained breaths and footsteps to sound much louder than they actually were. He’d only made it a few steps when he regretted not taking a peek at the news before he went out. He felt certain New York—the entire state, not just the city—was pretty much gone. The last he’d checked before heading to sleep the night before, it looked like Pennsylvania would be next, then likely Connecticut and New Jersey.
If the sickness everyone was calling Blood Fire was moving at that rate, he figured the Baltimore area and all surrounding regions had another twelve to sixteen hours before it showed up. But that was an educated guess, really; Terrence, like the newscasters and doctors working to pin down this virus, had no real idea of how quickly it was spreading. For all he knew, Baltimore could currently be in the same state as New York City.
With this thought in his head, Terrence stopped walking and cocked his head slightly, listening intently. If Baltimore was experiencing the chaos that came with the Blood Fire Virus, would he be able to hear the distant wail of sirens and destruction? It seemed like a longshot, as the city was about an hour away, but the morning was so still and quiet that he imagined it might be possible.
Hearing nothing, Terrence continued walking along the dirt track until he came to the gravel road that served as his driveway. A few early-rising butterflies drifted along the edge of the road, skirting along morning glories and dried up honeysuckle. They seemed to be escorting him, as if he’d already forgotten the way back to his house.
He found himself thinking of the necklace, and the day Trevor had given it to
him. It had been a birthday present which Trevor had not only made himself while hidden away in his room, but he’d also wrapped it messily in newspaper and scotch tape. The seashell he’d used to make it was a very small and slightly twisted conch shell he’d found in Myrtle Beach on a family vacation too many years ago to count. It had been two years before the divorce, when Trevor assumed that his parents were okay—when, as far as Terrence knew, he and Meredith had been okay. Sure, his job had overruled pretty much everything in his life at that point but it had only gotten worse. That trip to the beach had come before he met a man with dark, lethal secrets…before he learned about what that same man now only referred to in code, as CD.
This is how CD was supposed to start…
That line from their communication yesterday still haunted Terrence. They were living in it now. And if he didn’t take care of himself and shelter down, he was going to die just like all of those poor souls in New York City.
These thoughts were so staggering and overwhelming that it nearly made him miss the sight of the car parked in his driveway. His house was barely visible, mostly obscured by the slight curb and the trees that lined it along the thirty or so yards that separated him from his driveway. But he could see his truck and the car that had no business being there. It was parked right alongside his truck, as if the driver had been invited.
His heart fluttered for a moment; he wondered if it might be Meredith and Trevor, coming to see him as the world started to peel away all around them. Maybe Meredith would embrace him and apologize, telling him that she was so sorry—that he had been right all this time.
It Falls Apart Series | Book 1 | It Falls Apart Page 15