The Last War Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 5-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  The SS badging was everywhere, the glass was clean—Miles started the engine—and the motor sounded hungry. No, it sounded ravenous. Miles gave it some gas and the exhaust tinged the air with a rich fuel mixture that reminded him of the old days and his dad’s Pontiac Firebird. Now that was a car!

  He opened the door, slid onto the hard leather seats, looked at the antiquated dash and gauges, the SS branded steering wheel, the automatic transmission which looked less like a stick shift and more like the throttle on a boat.

  “I’d like to meet the owner of this thing,” Ben heard himself saying in a rare moment of him letting his guard down.

  “You’re sitting with him,” Miles grinned.

  Ben frowned, his guard right back up. “Well then, I take that back.”

  “Don’t be a bitch, Ben. We’re in the catbird seat. That’s got to mean something, man.”

  Ben was right handed, but his left hand was still pretty brutal in the day. He snapped a jab at Miles, caught him on the hinge of his jaw, rocked his head sideways. He didn’t have the energy to finish and his stomach was really aching now, like he’d swallowed a stone and now it was just sitting there, spreading the kind of deep pain that hurts you in your shins.

  Shaking it off, even chuckling a little, Miles slid the car into REVERSE then looked over his shoulder as they backed out of the garage and into what was designated as Site R’s Inner Roadway.

  “Back in the day,” Miles said, not really humbled, but lacking in the recent psychopathic charm, “my little sister used to hit harder than that.”

  “Your little sister is more of a man than you are,” Ben commented, having met the woman once a few years back.

  “True.”

  “How much horsepower does this thing have?” he asked as he listened to the big motor rumble.

  “Three hundred and fifty under the hood. I tried to find the LS6 when I started looking for something that was both old and had mammoth sized balls. The Chevelle’s LS6 had the 454, but there were only like forty-five hundred of them made. Not even that. I found this gorgeous looking one that was certified ninety-five point three percent original, but the guy wanted almost a hundred grand for it. Damn capitalists.”

  “Nothing wrong with capitalism.”

  “Don’t get me started, Ben,” he said as they drove through the opened blast doors on the way to the exits of what Ben thought were the C and D portals.

  When they left by the C portal and hit the open road, Miles juiced it, eating up the roadway where he could.

  “Why are the cars still moving?” Ben asked.

  “You put in the code, but that code has a timer on it. Gives us time to warn our friends and family, or get to safer ground.”

  “This isn’t safe ground,” Ben said. Then: “Are we even going to see this thing?”

  “Not sure. It’s supposed to detonate a few hundred miles up, but it won’t be directly over us.”

  He thought about it for a moment, knew his brain was still struggling to get back online after the last few days. He felt like it was working at about three-quarters of its normal capacity.

  “How far up is the atmosphere?” Ben asked.

  “There’s no real end. It just kind of bleeds out into space,” he said, looking at him funny. “What do you want, Ben, a science lesson?”

  “You said they’d detonate a few hundred miles above the surface.”

  “Yeah, about two hundred and fifty, maybe three hundred miles. That way we get enough spread to cover the US. They could detonate higher into the atmosphere as well, depending on how involved The Silver Queen is with this thing.”

  “I thought she didn’t know about the EMP originally. That it was off the grid, so to speak.”

  He looked at Ben and said, “There is nothing she doesn’t know. I didn’t have to tell her anything.”

  “She could have done this whenever she wanted,” Ben said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “So now she’s going to control the EMP, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why doesn’t she go higher and hit more of the world?” Ben asked, knowing the question made him sound stupid, but he didn’t care, not with the condition he was in both physically and mentally.

  The way Miles was driving threatened to completely unseat him. Ben really had nothing to hang on to as they swerved through light traffic, honking as they went. He slid on his lap belt, placed hands on both the door and the ceiling for support. At least Miles seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “I think the ionosphere starts at about fifty miles up and goes on for like four hundred miles,” Miles said, tapping the brakes, sliding sideways for a second then swerving into oncoming traffic and around a slowed car. Horns were honking like crazy. “Beyond that is the exosphere. Up there, it’s too high. Not right, I guess. Something about atmospheric pressure or temperature or something.”

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked, certain he was in the final moments of his life.

  Miles was now on the accelerator, blowing by cars too fast, passing on the shoulders (and nearly getting sideways once), earning a few middle fingers, more than a few retaliatory honks and one guy who tried to scare them by swerving into them. Miles took it all in stride, almost like nothing he did would have any consequences.

  Perhaps he was right.

  “Temperature is too low, gas atoms are spaced too widely. Whatever. I don’t know about all this geothermal mumbo jumbo, Ben. It’s just going off where it’s supposed to.”

  They followed Monterey Lane through a series of S curves, the tires squealing only slightly as they flew down the road. Miles raced over the train tracks, nearly lost control around a tight bend in the road, barely missed wrapping the back end around a roadside tree.

  “For God’s sake, chill,” he said.

  “We’ve got to get as far south as we can before the EMP hits. When that happens, all these new Japanese and Korean hunks of junk will be dead where they sit. It’ll be like a graveyard of cars and people mingling and asking questions. I don’t want to get caught up in all that.”

  The country road took them from Pennsylvania into Maryland with almost no notice. There was only a change of color on the asphalt. Ben glanced down the state line and marveled at life along the Pennsylvania/Maryland border. One guy, where his house was built, he could sit on his back porch in Pennsylvania, but go to bed in Maryland. People who straddle states, he wondered, where are they really grounded?

  Two white signs ahead faced them: 550 North and 550 South. There was some traffic, but it was light like you’d expect on the rural roads while the nation was under attack by what many of these people would consider unidentified objects. Being rural, with a lower population along the border, they didn’t see but a few drones passing overhead, and not much destruction.

  Sliding sideways into Hwy 550, they clipped a Hyundai at the stop sign which spun them around heading north. Grunting, Miles clearly wanted to go south. Sitting in the middle of the two lane highway, Miles threw the car in reverse, smoking the tires as he got some speed, cranked the wheel and spun the front end around. Halfway through the spin, he jammed the car in drive, barked the tires and they shot forward, weaving in and out of traffic like maniacs once more.

  “All these people are going to die,” he told Miles.

  “Not these ones. They have cows and crops and plenty of land. It’ll be the worst inside the cities. Especially the big cities. Columbus, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington. It’s going to be a nightmare if you get caught there.”

  “And we’re going to—”

  “Washington.”

  They navigated the two lane road as best as they could, Miles finally being forced to slow down and not go a hundred miles an hour. This put Ben at ease some because the tires were heating up and getting a little slick around the corners at higher speeds.

  Heading down 550, they passed by a world he hadn’t seen since his campaign days, and not even then. The life he was seeing was a simpler looking
life. Even though he knew these folks had challenges he couldn’t imagine, they somehow had that idyllic feel, like maybe in another life he’d choose their world over his own.

  His eyes clearing, his mood sobering to the fact that he was no longer having to slog through the mire that was D.C. politics and that his family was gone, he didn’t much care if they lived or died. His mood darkened and he found himself getting pissed off.

  By then they passed by brick churches and painted clapboard businesses. They passed people talking on the side of the road. They passed a cow. Ben couldn’t stop thinking about the disruption of life that was about to occur. He saw a woman chatting up three other women in front of a roadside café and he wondered how they would survive without running water, electricity, proper sewage systems. He wondered if they could grow their own food, make their own fires, defend their homes if they needed to do so with a weapon.

  The scene was soon a blur as they picked up speed again.

  Miles was back to riding the brakes and cursing under his breath at how slow these “country hicks” drove.

  These people had to know what was going on, he thought to himself. They had to have a sense of impending doom. Looking around, he felt like there was an unmistakable sensation of unease hanging over the air. He imagined it felt so bad, it forced the smart folks into hiding. Or maybe he was presuming too much. Maybe it was just him. Maybe he was the one feeling like this because he was in hiding and he didn’t feel very smart.

  While easing up to a stop sign with three cars in front of them, a twenty-something kid at the corner with longish brown hair in his face, tight jeans and a checkered T glanced over at them. His eyes landed on Ben. The kid did a double take then turned back to his friends. More sly now, he glanced back again, guarded this time, talking fast to his friends.

  Ben didn’t know if the kid was excited thinking he was seeing the President or if he was mesmerized by the muscle car. It was a badass car, even if it was Miles’s ride. On closer look though, the kid’s eyes were definitely on him. And his mouth? It was still moving about a thousand miles an hour. The cars ahead of them went through the stop sign, and after a moment, they were at a crossroads, Miles completely unaware of the attention they were getting.

  Ben looked away from the kids, offering them nothing even though he imagined they must be beside themselves wondering why the President was out in the middle of rural Maryland in a muscle car looking like death brought out to dry.

  As they drove through Sabillasville they saw green fields, endless trees, telephone poles and miles of telephone wire draped not only from house to house but across the highway, too. Then one of those wires suddenly caught fire and burned the line to a transformer where it exploded in a shower of sparks.

  “It’s here,” Ben said.

  “Yep.”

  The EMP was real. Lines all over were burning. Transformers were exploding up as far ahead as he could see. As they raced down the highway, dodging cars now coasting to a stop on the side of the road, sections of the telephone lines dropped, sparking out. Several of the wooden phone poles were now on fire, their transformers fizzling against them. Cars were slowing to the side of the road, even though theirs was now charging ahead full steam, almost like Miles was desperate to take advantage of those last few seconds before the confusion turned people into the inconveniences they would surely become.

  Up ahead, they roared up the highway, driving parallel to the train tracks and through some incredibly dense forest. To the right, deeper into the trees was Camp David. He would not go there. Never again. Up ahead, there were a few cars stalled in the road, and what looked like an accident.

  “Great,” Miles growled.

  “What’s your hurry? Time isn’t even going to matter from this point out.”

  “There’s a rendezvous with the people…involved.”

  “I’m sure your little friends won’t mind if you’re a bit late.”

  “They’re heading west hoping to meet The Silver Queen in person. I would like to go with them. We both need to go.”

  “How far west are you planning on going?” Ben asked, eyeing him sideways.

  “Maybe Colorado. Texas. We’ll get word from her, some way.”

  “You guys are fools. You think the new God of this world cares about you? She likes you enough to eradicate nearly your entire species. And now you want to travel through what will soon be a veritable hell to meet her? You won’t know what she looks like. You won’t be able to call, to text, to IM her. How did you think this was going to play out, Miles?”

  Waving a dismissive hand, he pulled up to the accident, couldn’t see a way through, then said, “This is going to hurt.” Shaking his head and short on options, Miles found the weakest point in the pile up, eased the Chevelle forward against nearly frantic urgings by the owners of those cars to “Stop!” and worked the gas pedal.

  Hands were slapping the Chevelle’s sheet metal, the windows, the windshield. Then they saw who was in the passenger seat and the ruckus died down. That’s when Miles juiced the gas, lighting up the tires. The screech and whine of metal-on-metal being shoved out of the way was a sick sound any car lover would be horrified to hear. When the sedan and the cheap sport coupe gave way, so did the Chevelle. It finally pushed through the cars, the screeching continuing all along the sides of Miles’s car.

  “That was about the most painful thing I think I’ve ever done,” he said. Ben just shook his head and went back to the fog of emotional sickness he’d been hovering in since this whole thing started.

  At some point, he looked out the side window and couldn’t stop the tears. Discretely he wiped them away, but they wouldn’t stop. Along the road, the railroad tracks moved further away, leaving only a running creek in between them.

  “It really is beautiful, isn’t it?” Miles said.

  He sat up, but didn’t look at his former colleague. “Yeah.”

  “When you look at that, how do you feel?”

  Turning around, he leveled the man with a stare. The thing about his family dying was it precipitated with the actions of guys like Miles. He could make the case that Miles killed his family and this had his nostrils flaring, his molars grinding.

  “I see you’re in that dark place again.” He gassed the Chevelle, driving too quickly, not even considering what they might encounter around each corner. “If you punch me, Ben, you’ll kill us both.”

  “It’ll be a relief,” he growled.

  “The reason I asked you about the trees, the creek, all the greenery, is because this is what we’re trying to get back to. Nature. Mother Earth’s bounty. Overpopulation is a disease. We are the problem, Ben. Humans.”

  “Save your soapbox protestations for the feeble minded,” Ben said.

  “With your status, you’ll have no problem getting another wife, and with some luck she can pop out a few—”

  He didn’t have time to finish the sentence. Ben backhanded him in the eye so hard, the man startled, his hands coming off the wheel at sixty miles an hour. Ben grabbed the wheel, kept them as straight as he could, let the man get his wits about him.

  “If you ever mention my wife again, I swear to God Miles, I’ll kill you. You hear me? I will KILL you.”

  Sitting up straight, his eye watering, he put a hand on the wheel and tapped the brakes. Apparently he didn’t want to die as badly as Ben. The former President called his bluff and he lost. Up ahead, in the sky, a glint of metal caught his eye. Ben leaned forward, looked up through the glass and the on-and-off canopy of trees and saw a plane falling out of the sky.

  “Follow the trajectory of that plane!” he said, suddenly renewed, if only to serve some sort of purpose.

  Miles looked up and said, “Which one?”

  There were now three.

  “What airport is nearby here?” he asked as he saw the two extra planes Miles was referring to. Both disappeared from view while the one he was originally tracking remained visible.

  “Frederick Municip
al. Just south-east of the city.”

  As they drove in and out of view of the valley below, and the city of Frederick, Ben tracked the plane until he lost sight of it.

  “They’re goners,” Miles said, his face still beat red from where he’d been smacked.

  “Shut up,” Ben replied.

  When they cleared the most recent cover of trees, Ben watched the plane drop below his line of sight. They weren’t close enough to see what would happen, but he already knew how this story would end. He took a moment to pray for those lost souls on board.

  “If they die, you’re party to mass slaughter, Miles,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You’re party to genocide. No, to the eradication of an entire species.”

  “Who will be around to care?” Miles said, less flippantly than when he’d made the wife comment that got him hit.

  “If the cockroaches survived when dinosaurs couldn’t, surely people like you will survive when good people can’t.”

  “And the meek will inherit the earth,” Miles replied.

  “Not if I can help it,” Ben said.

  “It probably went down outside Thurmont.”

  They were up against another wall of trees and dead telephone wires. Much of the road was passable, but a lot of it wasn’t. They took the shoulder, shoved a few cars out of the way with the Chevelle, genuinely upset more people who were just minding their own business when the power went out of everything: their cars, their cell phones, their laptops.

  They saw evidence of the downed airliner before they saw the actual wreck. When they reached the valley floor, they passed some sort of a long, low slung school painted in an ugly shade of brown. Behind the school, a hefty column of smoke tunneled its way into the air.

  “We’re not going there,” Miles said.

  “I know,” Ben said, the tension gone from his voice.

  “What did you think you were going to do? Save them? You can’t save everyone, Ben. You need to focus on yourself. I didn’t have to let you live back there—”

  “And I don’t have to let you live here,” Ben countered.

  “True.”

  “They are people, Miles. Human beings.”