Escape the Fall (Nuclear Survival: Southern Grit Book 2)

by Harley Tate

“What? I’m a single guy and I shop at Costco.”

  Dan slapped Grant on the shoulder. “That’s the type of place we need to hit. Get a working car and back it up to a loading bay at a Costco and fill ’er up. We could feed the entire neighborhood.”

  “I’ll be satisfied with getting out of here and all the way home with what we’ve got.”

  “I hear you.” Dan headed toward the front of the store to check the windows.

  Grant adjusted the shoulder straps of his bag and Oliver slung the messenger bag across his body.

  “Fellas?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We might have a problem.”

  With his pack weighing him down, Grant trundled over to the window like a bear on two legs. “What is it?”

  Dan pointed. “Look.”

  Grant peered between two letters on an oversized window cling and froze. A group of five men stood in the parking lot, motioning at the building and talking. From the looks of them, they weren’t the security crew.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Grant nodded. “Time to run out the back and hope we don’t get caught.”

  “Exactly.”

  Grant hustled back to Oliver and took the man by the arm. “We need to go, now.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Grant lowered his voice as they hurried to the rear door. “Five men. Burly, tattooed. Real winners. One has a baseball bat.”

  Oliver shuddered. “Are they coming here?”

  Dan labored to keep up. “I don’t think they’re looking for a puppy at the pet store.”

  “What if they’re casing the place? Someone could already be at the back.”

  “It’s a risk we’ll have to take.” Grant fingered the Shield and cursed himself for leaving the spare magazine at home. “I’ve got eight rounds.”

  “Each rifle’s good for four and I’ve got four more in my pocket.”

  Grant ground his teeth together. Could they take out five guys in a firefight? Maybe, as long as there weren’t a whole pile more waiting in the back.

  He motioned toward the door. “Oliver, you swing it open, I’ll go first. If anyone’s there, I’ll shout a warning.”

  “What if they have a gun?”

  “Then I hope like hell I shoot first.”

  “This can’t be happening.”

  Dan checked his rifle. “Get used to it. This is child’s play compared to what’s coming.”

  Oliver shuddered. “Remind me next time to stay home.”

  “You’ll be fine. We’ve got your back.”

  Oliver reached for the handle. “Ready?”

  Grant nodded and the door swung open. He stepped forward into the blinding midday light.

  Chapter Sixteen

  LEAH

  North Georgia Regional Hospital

  North of Atlanta, Georgia

  Friday, 1:00 p.m.

  As the dim light from the parking garage receded, Leah’s skin pricked. The stench of the abandoned morgue curdled the last of Tilly’s biscuits in her stomach and she pulled her shirt up over her nose.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick.” Neil called out from the dark.

  “We need a flashlight.” Leah ran her fingers along the wall until a doorway stopped her progress. “There’s usually one tucked inside most rooms for emergencies.”

  “Even in the morgue?”

  She hesitated. “I hope so.”

  Clinging to the edge of the room, Leah felt in the darkness for anything that might be of use.

  Light switches. A sharps container. A hand sanitizer pump on the wall.

  She kept going.

  Her thighs ran into a cart and something flopped against her belly. She froze. Please don’t be what I think it is. Leah reached out with halting fingers, staggering through the darkness until her skin collided with the decaying flesh of someone long departed.

  “Find anything?” Neil called from the safety of the hallway.

  “Not yet.” She forced down a rising tide of terror and circumvented the cart. It’s just a dead body. She repeated it over and over in her mind, reminding herself that this apocalypse was brought on by man and not the underworld. No one was coming back to life inside the morgue.

  After a series of carts, she found a storage wall. Her fingers trailed over the counter and down to handles of cabinets. One after the other, Leah opened and searched like a blind woman for something that might chase away the dark.

  On the last upper cabinet, she met success. A small flashlight no bigger than her palm. She clicked it on and light flooded the room.

  Leah spun around. A scream threatened to erupt from deep within her, but she willed it back with clenched teeth.

  The room was filled with bodies. They lay in heaps on every cart, some two or three high. A stack of them slumped along the wall she hadn’t searched, draped in hospital sheets as if they cared about their modesty.

  So many dead. Leah approached the nearest gurney. A man of no more than twenty-five lay on it, burns covering one half of his face. His arm was imprinted with burns in the pattern of his shirt.

  She’d seen similar photos in the books on Hiroshima: women with kimono patterns etched in black across their backs.

  Another body, more burns and missing hair and sores. One after the next, each one a victim of radiation. Some so severe, they must have died within hours of arrival at the hospital.

  This hospital had to be twenty miles from the center of the blast and out of the plume. If it were overrun, what must the in-town hospitals be like? Leah couldn’t imagine.

  “Oh, Lord.” Neil stood in the doorway of the room, face as white as the sheets covering the dead.

  Leah stalked up to him. “This is why your wife needs fluids. If she doesn’t get them, she’ll be one of these bodies. Soon.”

  Neil stared in detached amazement, the horror spreading across his face and numbing his features into blank incomprehension.

  Leah grabbed him by the arm. “Let’s get upstairs and get what we need.” She tugged him along and he stumbled by her side like a member of the dying. “Get it together, Neil. I’m going to need your help.”

  “I didn’t think… I didn’t imagine…” He stopped walking and Leah jerked as his weight whipped her backward.

  “Don’t think about it. Just do what we came here to do.”

  He ran his tongue over his lips. “We’re all going to die.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re not sick.”

  “No, not from radiation.” He looked around him like a parched man in a desert. “We’re never going to make it. Who’s going to open the stores? Who’s going to turn the lights back on?” He fumbled for his back pocket and pulled out a worn leather wallet.

  With shaking fingers, Neil thumbed through his money. “I’ve got seventeen dollars. What’s that going to buy me now?”

  Leah let her shirt fall off her face and sucked in a breath. She’d gotten used to the smell. “We can’t worry about that now. We need to focus and stay on task.”

  “I can’t… I don’t…”

  “You can and you will.” Leah dug her nails into Neil’s upper arm and yanked him off center. “Now.”

  She hauled him down the hall with one hand while she held the flashlight in the other. Soon, they reached the main hub of the hospital and the useless elevators. “The emergency room will be on the first floor. We’ll need to avoid it. A top floor is less likely to be ransacked.”

  Neil didn’t say a word as Leah navigated to the stairwell. After letting him go to open the door, she practically shoved him inside. “All the way up to the top. Maybe by then you’ll come to your senses.”

  He tramped up the stairs, one after the other, while Leah followed with the flashlight. Every time his frame obscured the beam of light, he cast ghoulish shadows on the wall ten feet high.

  They reached the top of the stairwell and Leah paused to catch her breath. “Better?”

  “A little.”

  “G
ood. We’re looking for IV fluid, IV kits, clean needles, lines, that sort of thing.”

  “Probably should get some antibiotics, too.”

  “Your wife doesn’t have an infection.”

  Neil pointed to Leah’s head. “But you do. Those stitches look gnarly. The skin’s all swollen and red.”

  Leah patted her scalp two inches below the wound and winced. Neil was right. If she didn’t find some medicine, she might end up like all the bodies in the morgue, too. “All right. Antibiotics. But we’ll probably have to find the pharmacy for those.”

  With a deep breath, Leah clicked off the flashlight and plunged the stairwell into darkness.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking precautions. If someone’s up on this floor, I don’t want to surprise them. We want to make it out of here in one piece, remember?” Leah didn’t wait for Neil to argue. She pushed open the stairwell door.

  Stale air wafted past her. It smelled of closed rooms and no air conditioning, but not death. She sucked in a lungful as Neil stepped into the hall beside her.

  “We need a supply room. Most floors have one where they keep essentials like fluids and syringes and high-volume supplies.”

  Leah set off, searching one room after the next, on and on down every hallway. From the looks of the empty rooms and orderly nursing stations, the floor had been evacuated with the power loss.

  Top floors usually held offices and day rooms, not overnight patients. It made sense to close them down and concentrate on the lower floors in an emergency. If Georgia Memorial survived the blast, the administrators would have done the same thing.

  She didn’t know how long they searched, but it seemed like hours. At last, they found the room she needed all the way across the hospital.

  Leah handed the flashlight to Neil and he held it up while she pulled together IV supplies and twelve bags of fluid. Then she moved on to instant cold packs and rolled bandages and anything else Mary could need while recovering.

  When she finished, a small mountain sat on the counter.

  “How are we going to carry all that?”

  Leah spun around and searched the stacks of supplies. “With these.” She grabbed four drawstring bags patients used for their clothes and handed two to Neil. “We can split the weight. Three fluid bags per and add the supplies on top. We’ll carry two each.”

  Neil complied, stuffing his share into two sacks before slinging one over each shoulder. “Now you need medicine.”

  Leah frowned. Searching for the pharmacy didn’t fill her with confidence. “I think we should skip it.”

  “No. You came all this way to help my wife. You need medicine and this is the best place to get it.”

  She opened her mouth to argue when a shout pierced the stillness. “Yo, Billy, I see a light!”

  Oh, no. Leah flicked the flashlight off. “We’ve got to go. Now.”

  “We’ll never find our way in the dark!”

  “We don’t have a choice.” Leah reached out and fumbled for his arm. “Come on.”

  Together, they crept out of the supply room, keeping tight to the wall. Leah tried to remember the route to the stairs. They edged down a long hallway, unsure when or if they would run into the man who spotted them.

  As the hall opened up to the hub in the middle of the hospital, a flashlight beamed popped out of a room and landed smack on Neil’s chest.

  “Run!” Leah shoved Neil toward the stairwell and he took off with the plastic sacks thumping on his back.

  Shouts rang out behind them and Leah urged Neil faster. He stumbled in front of her, sprawling out on the floor. Another beam of light lit up his back as he scrambled to his feet.

  “They’re running away!”

  “Stop them!”

  Neil hissed as he ran. “Who is it?”

  Leah didn’t want to waste time finding out. She grabbed a scrap of Neil’s shirt and dragged him toward the stairs. “Just go!”

  After throwing open the door, Leah rushed inside. Neil headed straight down and she eased the door shut behind her. Maybe they wouldn’t follow. Maybe she would luck out.

  As she rushed to follow Neil, the top door to the stairwell flew open. A flashlight beam pierced the dark. Leah flattened herself into a corner three floors down.

  “See ’em?”

  The beam of light tracked back and forth in slow motion. Leah squeezed her eyes shut and willed her body to disappear.

  After what seemed like forever, the light retreated. “Naw, they didn’t come down here.”

  She sagged in relief as the door shut. Five minutes later, she stumbled out the morgue entrance and found Neil in the shadows.

  “Did they see you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Were they hospital employees?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then who were they?”

  Leah had no idea, but she wasn’t about to go back inside and introduce herself. “If someone starts chasing you, it’s a pretty good sign they aren’t friendly.” She wiped sweat off her forehead and bit back a show of pain. Antibiotics would have to wait. “Let’s get back to your wife.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  GRANT

  Boundless Sports

  Smyrna, Georgia

  Friday, 2:00 p.m.

  Grant squinted into the sunlight, holding tight to the wall. With a stand of trees and a dumpster blocking his view, he couldn’t tell if the men Dan spotted were still in the front of the store, or if any had crept toward the back.

  Too late to worry about it now.

  He gripped the 9mm with firm, but not tight, fingers. With years of practice and thousands of rounds, Grant had confidence in his skill. He hoped that would be enough to make any shots count.

  Oliver held up a hand to block the light. “I don’t see them.”

  Grant nodded. “Agreed.”

  “Let’s make a run for it.”

  “I can’t run anywhere with this pack.” Dan lumbered out of the store, rifle low, but ready. “If they find us, we’ll have to persuade them to leave us alone or engage.”

  “What do you mean, engage?” Oliver’s voice squeaked. “We’re not here to shoot anyone!”

  Grant echoed Dan’s comments. “Only if they shoot first.”

  Oliver shut the door to the store and shook his head. “This is crazy. You two are overreacting.”

  He stepped away from the wall and Grant hissed at him. “Get back here.”

  “No. You two can play cops and robbers, but I’m walking home.” He pulled a pouch of electrolyte goo from his messenger bag and tore it open before sucking down the contents.

  Grant watched with increasing unease. The kid was going to draw attention. He’d be spotted and then they’d all have to deal with what happened next.

  He glanced at Dan. The older man shared his sentiment, scowling at Oliver as he boldly walked toward the street.

  “I don’t like this at all.”

  “Neither do I, but let’s go. He’s not going to make it on his own.”

  “Do we really need him?”

  Grant flicked his eyes back to Dan. “I’m not answering that.”

  “Sooner or later, you’ll have to make the tough choices.”

  “Not today.” Grant stepped away from the wall and eased through the empty loading bay. Every three steps, he scanned the horizon, sweeping left and right and back again.

  As Oliver reached the street, a shout rang out. “Hey, man! Whatcha doin’?”

  Grant rushed to the tree line, bobbing as the massive pack threw him off balance. He careened behind the closest trunk and landed in scrubby weeds. The weight of the pack made it impossible to move with enough speed. He unclipped the hip belt and shrugged the massive thing off his shoulders. It landed with a thud on the ground.

  Without the weight, Grant crept closer to Oliver. The kid stood in the middle of the empty street, his back to Grant.

  Someone outside Grant’s field of view shouted ag
ain. “Whatcha got in that bag, man? Food?”

  Oliver stammered. “It’s nothing. Just some clothes.”

  “I bet it’s beer. You got beer in there, dontcha? That’s why you aren’t interested in sharing.” The voice rose as it carried farther afield. “This fella’s got beer and he don’t wanna share.”

  A chorus of boos echoed from in front of the strip mall and Grant cursed. Maybe Oliver could sweet-talk his way out of the situation.

  “It’s not beer. Just some runner’s goo.”

  “What did you say? You’ve got some good stuff in there? We like good stuff. How about you come on over and let us take a look.”

  Oliver shook his head. “It’s not good. It’s goo. G-o-o.” He spelled out the words with a hint of frustration in his voice and Grant tensed. The kid was doing everything wrong.

  Easing farther down the line of trees, Grant froze when the man came into view. Jeans. T-shirt. Strong arms and a thick neck. Grant didn’t see a gun, but that didn’t mean the guy didn’t have one. He glanced back at Oliver. Where was his rifle? Didn’t he have it?

  He spun back to check on Dan. In the time Grant had been watching Oliver, Dan had made it to the grove of trees. Two rifles were propped on his shoulder as he heaved for breath. Great. Not only did Oliver have no sense when to keep his mouth shut, he also didn’t know when to brandish a weapon.

  Grant sucked in a breath. This needed to end. Now. He motioned to Dan to get the guns ready. The older man nodded and unbuckled his pack before sliding it to the ground. As soon as Dan brought one rifle up to his shoulder, Grant stepped out from behind the tree.

  Aiming his 9mm at the man in the street, he shouted to Oliver. “Get behind me. Now.”

  “But—”

  “Do it.”

  Oliver complied, easing behind Grant with his hands up.

  “Find Dan. Get a damn rifle.”

  Oliver muttered something under his breath, but Grant didn’t bother to listen. He jutted his chin at the stranger in the street. “You have an issue with my friend, you take it up with me.”

  The man hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “Seems like you’re the one with a problem. Way you’re pointin’ that gun at me and all.”