by Harley Tate
Something flashed across her vision. Did I fall asleep? She blinked her eyes open. Oh, no.
It wasn’t her nightmares of flames that caught her eye. A pair of headlights glowed in the distance.
Madison eased the shotgun strap off her shoulder and brought the gun into position. Not a single car had come this way in twenty-four hours. The chances of it being someone friendly were slim.
She eased around the side of the Nissan, crouching behind the far fender before propping her elbow up on the top for support. If they drove on by, she would stay hidden. But if they stopped…
With bated breath, she waited. The headlights grew in size, bobbing and weaving through the abandoned vehicles and debris left on the road. As the light bounced off the back of the Nissan and the top of the Jeep just beyond, the approaching car slowed.
Madison exhaled and steadied the gun.
The car eased into the parking lot, stopping twenty feet or so from the Nissan. Madison squinted into the headlights, the brightness blinding her. The engine shut off.
No one was stealing what they had left.
Madison lowered her head to catch the front sight of the gun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
WALTER
North of Sacramento, CA
6:00 a.m.
“So you’re just going to go out there? You don’t know if it’s them.”
“It’s a yellow Jeep and a Nissan, Drew. It has to be them.”
“What if it’s not? What if it’s some bad dude with a gun and you’re shot before you even say a word?”
Walter rubbed his hair back and forth on the top of his head. He needed a haircut and for Drew to get off his back. “I’m telling you. My wife and daughter are in those cars.”
Drew leaned toward the dashboard until the damn cat meowed on his lap. “I can’t see anything inside. They’ve got a whole bunch of crap in the back seat.”
“That’s what happens when your house burns down. You have to put everything in the car.” He reached for the door handle. “I’m getting out.”
“I can’t drive with this shoulder. If you get shot, what the hell am I supposed to do?”
Walter ran his tongue over his lip. “Grow a pair. That might help.” Before Drew could say another word, Walter pushed open the driver’s side door.
He eased out and stood behind it. For all that Drew pissed him off, he had a point. The last thing he needed was his own wife shooting at him. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Tracy! Madison!”
A voice he feared he would never hear again called out. “Kill the lights!”
“Madison, honey! It’s your dad!”
“I said, kill the lights or I’ll take you out.”
He heard a shotgun bolt move forward. Walter’s mouth fell open. Madison? His baby girl was threatening to kill him? The lights from the Jetta blinked out and Walter spun around.
Drew held up his hands. “What? You want to get shot?”
Walter exhaled and turned back around. “Madison! It’s Walter, your father. Please don’t shoot me.”
He stood behind the door to the car, waiting. After a moment, a flashlight beam hit him square in the face. He blinked and held up his hands.
“Dad!” The light left his face and came bounding at him, bouncing all over the place. “Oh my God, Dad!”
His daughter barreled into him, practically knocking him down as she wrapped her arms around him and held tight. Walter reached out to hug her back but ended up palming the barrel of a shotgun instead.
She pulled back and smiled. Up close, he could see the tears streaking down her dirty cheeks and the happiness beneath. “You’re all right.”
“I am now.” Walter glanced up. “Where’s your mom?”
“In the car. That thing is seriously soundproof. She probably doesn’t even know you’re here.”
“But she’s okay?”
Madison nodded. “She got burned pretty bad in the fire, but it’s just her hand. She’s taking meds and getting better.” His daughter patted his arms up and down. “What about you? Are you okay?”
“For the most part.” He motioned to Drew in the passenger seat. “My co-pilot here took a bullet to the shoulder, but he’ll live.”
Madison ducked to look in the car and shrieked. “Fireball!” She popped back up. “Dad! You found him!” She crouched down again next to the driver’s seat and the little cat stretched on Drew’s lap and made his slow way over to her. Madison scooped him up and nuzzled his fur.
“Thanks for rescuing him. We thought he died in the fire.”
Walter looked down at her in confusion. “When did you get a cat?”
His daughter smiled. “It’s a long story.” She motioned toward the Nissan. “Come on. Let’s wake up Mom.”
Walter exhaled. His family was alive.
He followed his daughter to the Nissan and she pulled open the passenger-side door. “Mom, wake up.”
His wife jolted awake in the driver’s seat. “Is something wrong? Are you okay?” She blinked hard as she focused on the cat. “Is that Fireball? Where did he come from?”
Madison smiled. “From this guy.” She stepped out of the way and Walter leaned down to catch the first glimpse of his wife in way, way too long.
“Walter!” Tracy screamed and reached for the door.
As she scrambled out, Madison tugged on his arm. “Watch her left hand, okay?”
He nodded and held himself still as Tracy rushed around the back of the car to practically jump into his arms. God, it felt good to hug his wife again.
“You’re alive!” She patted him all over with her one good hand just like his daughter had, tears flowing even faster than Madison’s a few minutes before.
“I am. And so are you, although I heard you hurt your hand.”
Tracy glanced down at her left hand and Walter’s eyes followed. He sucked in a breath. Where soft, pale skin used to be, angry weeping blisters took up residence. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. “Penny gave me some old antibiotics. They’re expired, but they seem to be working.”
Walter exhaled in relief. “Drew needs antibiotics, too. We’ll have to deal with that soon.”
Tracy’s brow knitted. “Who’s Drew?”
Walter pointed at the Jetta. “My co-pilot from the flight. We took off together after the crash landing. His fiancée didn’t make it though, so—”
“Whoa, hold up.” His wife held up her hands. “What crash landing?”
Walter laughed. “I think we have a lot to fill each other in on.”
“You better believe it.” Madison chimed in, still holding the little cat and smiling. “I’m going to wake everyone up, okay?”
Tracy nodded. “You do that, honey. Then we can all have some breakfast and figure out what to do next.”
Walter watched his daughter walk away before turning to his wife. Slipping his arms around her waist, he pulled her close and kissed her. Her lips still fit against his so well.
Everything he’d been through the past week. Everything he did and all the sacrifices he made were worth it. He’d found his family.
Twenty years together, multiple tours of duty, the birth of his daughter and everything that followed were nothing compared to the journey ahead. Walter knew they would struggle. But together, they would survive.
He pulled back as a ragtag assortment of kids Madison’s age all tumbled out of the Jeep and made their way toward the Nissan.
A teeny blonde girl who barely cleared Walter’s shoulder stuck out her hand. “Brianna Clifton. I’m Madison’s roommate. Well, former roommate, anyway.”
Walter shook her hand before turning to a kid wearing space T-shirt with hair in desperate need of a good trim. “Tucker Eldrin. Good to meet you, sir.”
The sir got him a few extra points, Walter had to admit.
Lastly, he smiled at the young man who outweighed him by a good thirty pounds and stuck out his hand. “Good to see you, Peyton.”
&nbs
p; “Good to see you, too, Mr. Sloane.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Drew ambled up to the lot of them, favoring his shoulder as he stopped beside Walter.
Walter smiled. “Everyone, this is Drew Jenkins. He was my co-pilot the day the grid failed. Without him, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
Drew shook each person’s hand as the introductions went around again. “Walter has saved my life more than once in the last week. You all are lucky he’s here.”
“Don’t we know it.” Tracy smiled up at him, her big eyes brighter than the bluest ocean. “Now who’s hungry? We don’t have a lot to choose from, but I’m sure we can make do.”
She turned to the car and began tasking each college kid with something to do. In minutes, a spread of various granola bars and bottles of water and Gatorade sat on the hood of the trunk. Each person picked out a few items and assembled in a makeshift circle in the parking lot.
Walter eased himself down between his wife and daughter and stretched out his legs. The first bite of the granola bar was the start of the best meal he’d had in years. It didn’t matter that they were homeless and sitting on broken asphalt in an abandoned parking lot.
His wife sat on his left and his daughter on his right. They were surrounded by friends, had food and water, and two working cars. What more could anyone ask for?
It might not be the future he imagined—no vacations to Italy or evenings out on the back porch with a beer and the setting sun—but it was more than he needed to survive. The power may never come back on, at least not in the way it did before, but they could still have a pretty good life.
He glanced over at Drew. As soon as breakfast ended, they would need to pack and work out a plan. Drew needed antibiotics. They all needed shelter.
But together they would work it out. After chatting and laughing and getting to know everyone, Walter finished his bottle of water and stood up. “Let’s load up and get this show on the road. I hear we’re off to Truckee?”
Brianna stood up, wiping off her backside as she nodded. “My parents have a cabin. More of a compound, really. There’s enough room for all of us.”
Walter tallied up the head count. “They have room for seven more people?”
She nodded. “And then some. As long as everyone contributes, everyone should be able to stay.”
Walter nodded. Even if the Cliftons said no once they got there, leaving the big city for the mountains seemed like as good an idea as any other. “The Jetta has about a third of a tank of gas. We can load up everything that fits and try to siphon a car somewhere for more fuel. How’s the Jeep?”
“It’s about the same.” Brianna glanced back at the Wrangler. “We can try to rearrange and get some more stuff on the rack.”
Peyton spoke up. “I’ll help. It’s a beast getting anything up there.”
As everyone split up, each helping to prepare, Walter marveled. A week in and they had formed a makeshift little family with responsibilities and roles already determined. If this was what the future held, he had hope. He smiled and walked toward the Jetta. “Come on, Drew. Let’s make some room.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
TRACY
Backroads of Northern California
2:00 p.m.
Tracy stared at her husband as he drove behind Brianna’s Jeep. She couldn’t believe he was alive and sitting beside her. After everyone packed both cars, the kids decided it would be nice to give the Sloane family a little bit of alone time, so Tracy, Walter, and Madison piled into the Jetta and Drew squeezed in with Brianna, Tucker, and Peyton in the Jeep.
Fireball refused to leave the Jetta, so Madison snuggled with him in the back. If Tracy didn’t look out the window and see the smashed-in store windows and abandoned cars, she could almost pretend the world hadn’t fallen apart.
While the kids got their breakfast, Walter had filled her in on a bit of his journey to find her, including his run-in with the National Guard. She turned to him. “Did the National Guard say anything about aid? How the government was getting along? Anything?”
Walter glanced at his daughter. “I don’t think now is the best time.”
“Dad. Anything you can say to Mom you can say to me. I’m an adult.”
Walter frowned, but Tracy reached out and rubbed his shoulder. “Madison is right. She’s faced more this last week than any nineteen-year-old should. If she can handle fleeing her college campus and getting shot at and a house fire, she can handle the truth. No matter what it is.”
Tracy smiled at her daughter. Madison still looked so young, but childhood didn’t linger forever. And in this new world, it was effectively over for everyone.
Her husband’s hands flexed on the steering wheel. “All right. I won’t sugarcoat it then. The short version is that there’s no help coming. The police basically don’t exist. Fire department, too. Downtown Sacramento was worse than LA in the riots. Every building burned out, every car flipped over, people shooting other people just because they can. It’s chaos. Madness.”
Tracy swallowed. It was worse than she expected. “What about the military?”
“Overwhelmed. The national guard is mobilized, the military too, I’d assume. When we ran into the unit from Eureka, they were headed to Sacramento to set up a defensive perimeter.”
Tracy started. “From what? Do they think there’s some threat? Is some other country going to take advantage of what happened?”
Walter shook his head. “No. It’s not like that.” He paused. “They were sealing downtown off. Locking the riot in.”
Tracy’s throat went dry.
“What do you mean?” Madison asked from the back seat. “How will people escape the violence?”
“They won’t. Not anymore, anyway.” Walter glanced at his wife, eyes full of bad memories. “We were lucky to get out. By the time we left Drew’s place, the barricades were going up. If we’d stayed another hour, we might have been trapped there.”
“Surely they would have let you out.”
“Orders were to keep it contained. They would have shot us if they had to.”
“Dad!”
“Sorry, Madison. It’s the truth.”
Tracy couldn’t believe it. “Why didn’t they send them in to stop the violence? That’s what they did in the riots in ’92.”
“Not enough personnel. It took over ten thousand troops on the ground to get the LA riots under control and it took them days to get there. That was with electricity and the rest of the state and country at peace.”
Walter shook his head. “There’s no way without a means to communicate that the military can mobilize anyone in sufficient numbers. The National Guard members I spoke to didn’t want to be there. A few were disappearing every day. Once they realize it’s not getting better and they won’t get paid for their efforts, most will leave.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once those soldiers figure it out, the ones with families will leave. I spoke to a few of them. They all said the same thing: ‘Why would I stay? So I can watch the end of the world while my family starves?’”
He glanced at Tracy. “In a few weeks, all that will be left of the military will be a bunch of single young men with guns, MREs, and no future to speak of. I hate to think what will happen next.”
Tracy shuddered. Even after all that she’d been through, from surviving the run-in at Wanda’s apartment complex to stealing a car to get back home, to the looters and the fire and everything in between, she hadn’t grasped the full impact of what it all meant.
“Do you think anyone will come help us? Canada or Europe, maybe?”
Madison scoffed in the back seat. “They all hate us, Mom. I read this article right before all of this and it said movie companies have to remove all images of the American flag in their ads in order to sell their movies in Europe. Think about it. A movie poster about the Civil War or World War II where they can’t show the American flag.”
“Madison’s right. A lot of pl
aces will cheer. The others will be afraid. Besides, we don’t know they weren’t affected, too.” He shook his head. “Like it or not, we can’t expect any help from anyone.”
Tracy looked out the window. All that they had built. Shops, restaurants, homes. Infrastructure. Technology. How many people worked for companies whose products were one hundred percent digital? The ingenuity of Americans was something to marvel.
In a half a century, the country had gone from small towns and backyard gardens to big cities with convenience stores on every corner. How many people even knew what a tomato plant looked like or could tell when a carrot was ripe and should be pulled from the ground?
Did anyone in a major city know how to hunt or raise livestock or even chop firewood and start a fire? Tracy had tried to teach Madison the basics. They backpacked, camped, and fished every summer—all the things Tracy wished she’d done as a kid.
But most families were glued to their screens, too busy typing away and snapping pictures of themselves to learn how to survive. While the world became increasingly complicated, the basics of life remained the same.
Food. Water. Shelter.
How had they forgotten that?
She tuned to her husband. “We really are on our own, aren’t we?”
Walter nodded. “Yes we are.”
Tracy reached out and rested her hand on top of his. “Whatever comes, we can face it together.” She turned to her daughter and smiled. It wouldn’t be easy, but every day that she got to wake up and see the face of her daughter and her husband would be a good day.
They might not have much, but they had each other. Together, they could survive anything. She dropped her hand and leaned back in her seat. All they needed to do was take it one day at a time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MADISON
Backroads of Northern California
4:00 p.m.
Madison leaned against the back seat, Fireball soft and snuggly on her lap. She still couldn’t believe her father found them. To think she almost shot him before he called out.
She laughed to herself.