Until Nothing Remains: A Hybrid Post-Apocalyptic Espionage Adventure (A Gun Play Novel: Volume 1)

by C. A. Rudolph

  Natalia gurgled solemnly. “No, not quite. But they are here for me.”

  “For what?”

  “For what? Because of what I did. I killed him, Quinn. I put Dmitry in a grave. Orloff’s father is dead because of me, and Ukrainians aren’t known for taking that sort of thing lightly.”

  Now my gears were really beginning to churn and grind. “I get that, but you’re not the fledgling femme fatale you once were. Does he have any concept of who you are or who you’ve become? The crew he sent wasn’t shit—they weren’t even close to being a JV team. I take it he’s got better…”

  “Oh, trust me, he does,” said Natalia. “And, Q? Believe me when I tell you this…our little run-in back there was nothing. This is far from over.” She turned away and exhaled gently through her nostrils while staring out her window at the trees and intermittent buildings passing by alongside the road. “You know, I’m really sorry. I’ve somehow fucked things up again for us. I’ve added another layer to an already convoluted predicament. But you’re in this now just as much as I am. And you need to realize…this changes things a bit.”

  “I’d contend it changes things a lot a bit.”

  “It does. You know, Q…I still want to find a way to make this right. I want to put a stop to these attacks somehow. But we might need to go dark for a while before that happens.” She glanced over at me. “If Orloff’s men are in the country looking for me, they won’t stop until they find me. We must go somewhere far away from where they’re most likely to look. Somewhere no one knows us.”

  “Do you think we’re capable of stopping them?” I asked.

  “Of course we can. But I need to be able to see them coming. I have to get the drop on them, and I can’t do that surrounded by city lights.”

  Though I couldn’t see them yet, ahead of us in the distance were the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we were currently travelling west, headed right for them. The more Natalia and I spoke, the more it felt like a magnet was pulling me there. “Then we’ll go somewhere that makes sense for us. We’ll keep heading west until we find a town rural enough. Someplace we don’t see cameras at every intersection.”

  Natalia exhaled through her nostrils. “Sounds good to me. It’s a start, anyway.”

  Keeping the Denali between the lines on the highway, I looked over at my wife and caught a visual of the concern building in her eyes. I didn’t recall ever seeing that look before. She was legitimately worried about this…possibly even afraid for her life, and that was causing my core instincts as her husband and as her protector to flood with a primal emotion.

  There was simply no way I would allow anyone, much less these barbarians from the Ukraine, to get anywhere near her. I would spill the blood of a thousand men to keep her safe, without thinking twice about it. Natalia was the only thing that mattered to me. Loving her had become a reflex long ago, and without her, I was as good as dead anyway.

  I reached for her hand. “Don’t worry about this, okay? I’ll put an end to all of it, I promise. One way or another…I swear to you. I will find a way.”

  She peered over to me and half smiled, taking my hand in hers. Her fingers slid around mine and enclosed them. She squeezed my hand and, for a moment, looked as if she wanted to say something, though nothing escaped her lips, and that was okay with me. Her silence was telling me everything I needed to know. It told me she trusted me and believed in me, and nothing else needed to be said.

  While we gradually put distance between ourselves and the city, progressing through and out of the overpopulated suburbs, my level of unease began to evaporate. I still couldn’t help but wonder why the hell this all had come to pass in the manner in which it had.

  We’d been lying low, keeping our noses clean for so long; back in business again for one final act—one final op to end all ops. And after today, it felt like we were right back where we’d started from at the beginning. Up to our noses in shit, barely able to breathe.

  We were making our way through the last few bustling intersections of Chantilly, Virginia, when Natalia’s attention locked onto the instrument cluster. She pointed to the fuel gauge, something that had eluded me until this very second. “What dummkopf spends eighty grand US on a monstrosity like this and leaves it parked with a quarter tank of gas?”

  After a quick glance at the gauge, I replied casually, “Obviously, the dummkopf who procured this monstrosity prior to us.”

  Natalia placed her elbow next to the window and rested her head on her knuckles. “I suppose we should consider stopping for gas before we get too far away from civilization.”

  My wife had a point. Our plan was fly-by-night at best, and neither of us knew how far we were headed. It was my intention to keep driving until I saw more foliage than shades of asphalt and concrete, but we wouldn’t get far on this little fuel.

  With America under attack, population density had become a high-value target, and collateral damage was at the very apex of the Islamists’ hit list. Our issues with the Ukrainians notwithstanding, remaining in any city or overpopulated suburbia was practically suicide, and an altogether bad fucking idea.

  Natalia rapped her knuckle on the window and pointed, indicating a Shell station just ahead. I acknowledged her and slowed the Yukon, signaled, and pulled into the lot, immediately falling into position in the longest line of cars waiting for gas I had ever seen before.

  I slammed on the brakes, just barely missing rear-ending a faded white Oldsmobile piloted by an elderly woman with a globe of bushy white hair. She glanced up at me through the rearview and threw her hands in the air, chastising me for the near miss.

  “She looks pissed,” Natalia joked.

  I nodded. “I see that. Imagine how mad she’d be if I’d actually hit her.” I sat up in my seat and leaned over the steering wheel, getting a better view of the chaos in the parking lot. “Look at this shit…it’s insane. I take it everyone and their cousin decided to come to this gas station at the same time today? Are they running a sale?”

  Natalia started to look nervous. She reached for the Grach pistol under her thigh while cautiously studying our perimeter. “Maybe they’re worried about the likelihood of not being able to get gas again for a while.”

  “It’s conceivable. Or maybe they’re in hoarding mode—thinking prices are going to skyrocket in a day or two. That’s retroactive standard procedure for most people following a terrorist attack.”

  “Mm-hmm. The human equation and the wisdom of hindsight,” Natalia remarked. “But we’ve seen multiple incidences already, occurring back-to-back, just on day one. Maybe there’ve been more since then.”

  I hesitated, glancing up at the Denali’s touchscreen audio system, which I was sure included an AM/FM radio. “Speaking of hindsight, there’s probably an abundance of news outlets on broadcast radio. But I seem to remember having disabled it last night…for some reason.”

  Natalia continued her perimeter check with a scrupulous eye while her index finger delicately caressed the Grach’s smooth trigger guard. “Look at all these cars. And there’s even more pulling in behind us. If we don’t get out of here soon, we’re going to be boxed in.” She looked to me, layering her hair over her ear with a finger. “Maybe we should try the next one.”

  I nodded and shifted the transmission into drive. “I’m on it,” I said, depressing the accelerator and whipping the wheel to the left.

  Barely escaping two successive collisions, I powered the Denali back onto US Route 50 and motored west in search of another gas station while my eyes checked the fuel gauge every few seconds, expecting the next green LED to disappear.

  It wasn’t long before an audible electronic bell sounded off, bringing both our attentions to the instrument cluster. The heads-up display was now warning us that the truck had only fifty miles’ worth of gas left in the tank.

  Fantastic. Here we were in the middle of Northern Virginia—the land of plenty—and the one thing we needed, we couldn’t have because everyone else needed it and coul
dn’t have it. You sure picked the right car to boost, Mr. Barrett. Better luck next time.

  We drove on, navigating around several stalled automobiles and a few inauspiciously located traffic circles before the highway converted from four lanes into two. Crossing over a bridge barely wider than a single lane, we came into the town of Aldie and, after passing a fire station on the left, noticed a small mom-and-pop gas station up ahead.

  “There’s one right there,” Natalia said, pointing. “It’s bizarre, though. No long line of cars.”

  “Maybe word hasn’t traveled this far yet.”

  Natalia giggled slightly. “I’m sure this event has already gone viral. It probably has its own Twitter handle by now.”

  I slowed the black behemoth again and pulled into the station, right up to the first unleaded gas pump. The store looked far from being abandoned, but there weren’t any lights on in the building, and the neon sign indicating whether the store was open or closed wasn’t lit. “Think the power is off?”

  Natalia peered out her window. “Shit. You might have something there. I don’t recall seeing anything lit up for several miles before we pulled into town.”

  Funny how we tend not to take notice of things that don’t occur very often. Typical power outages happened all the time when I was a kid, following a thunderstorm, during heavy snowfall, or whatnot. But a major power outage, something much more long term and widespread, could occur at any given moment while appearing as the same, without providing one iota of how principal of an event it was.

  I remembered reading an excerpt on normalcy bias once, not long after leaving boot camp. Sometimes referred to as analysis paralysis, it stated that at one point or another, we may be deployed in a disaster zone or other hostile environment, and find ourselves dealing with people who are wholly affected, yet steadfastly underestimate the hazards. They believe it’s temporary and reparable, and completely normal, when it’s far from being so. They trust they are safe when they are in danger. It can sometimes lead to cognitive dissonance, where inherent contradictory beliefs clash with their perception of reality.

  If this situation continued to escalate, which I was fairly certain it would, after what we had learned, this country would be dealing with the largest case of normalcy bias ever beheld, brought about by an enduring disaster of monumental proportions. Something its people were not only completely unprepared for and not in any way ready to deal with, but also had no means of preventing or stopping. How did you put down an enemy you couldn’t see? How did you stop attacks you couldn’t predict? What did you do with a ruthless enemy who attacked you at your doorstep, after you’d spent decades pretending and preaching that he never existed and was never a threat to you?

  I stepped out of the truck and made my way to a rickety wooden door with several single-paned glass frames, all of which bore stickers with brand names, most of which I recognized. I twisted the brass knob and it didn’t give, then I peered inside the glass to see if anyone was milling about inside. The shelves were stocked, but the store was devoid of bodies.

  “The place is deserted,” I said, motioning to Natalia through the open driver-side door. I got back in the Denali and drove on in search of our next opportunity.

  The next town we encountered along the way was the lively and rather ornate village of Middleburg, home to much of rural Northern Virginia’s upper class, horse enthusiasts, and a handful of retired sports celebrities. The town was teeming with pedestrians and vehicular traffic, and its one and only gas station had already put signage in place advertising that they’d run out of fuel. We continued without stopping, noticing as we drove that the town’s only traffic light wasn’t working. This quaint hamlet looked to have been left without power, same as the last one.

  Now I was beginning to wonder just how large this outage was. What could have been the cause of it? Had ISIS chosen to attack electrical substations already? Or was this an incident on a much grander scale? Had they taken out a nuclear power plant? There were far too many questions, and we needed to locate some intel.

  Ten miles to the west and after passing a handful of ranches and horse farms, we entered the town limits of Upperville. Spotting an Exxon station ahead on the left, I pulled the Denali into the gravel parking lot without thinking twice about it. The truck was running on fumes now, and if we didn’t find some gas for it soon, we’d be walking the rest of the way to wherever we were headed.

  I got out and took a quick look around, detecting the smell of two odors in the air. The first, the arid smell of wood smoke—the kind that could only be sourced from a nearby forest or brush fire. It was intertwined with humidity, and I couldn’t tell if the source was close by or far away from here. The second was the exhaust fumes from an internal combustion engine. Along with the cackling and sputtering of a crude muffler echoing from the rear of the building, it was easy to discern a generator was being operated here. If a genset was running, the lights would be on inside, and with that, the gas pumps might still work. If we were going to have any chance of filling up the Denali’s bottomless pit of a gas tank, this was going to be it.

  Natalia called to me from her spot in the passenger seat. “Hey, Q?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to don some fresh bandages soon. Care to advise a sitrep?”

  I gestured with my head to the building. “This one looks promising. I’m going in. If I’m not back in five, wait another five.”

  I made my way to the store’s entrance, twisted the handle, and pushed the door open to the sound of an assemblage of bells jingling along, indicative of most rural convenience stores I’d visited before. Directly in front of me at the counter stood three men, one behind it and two leaning against it, one on either side. They said nothing to me, no ‘howdy, partner’ or ‘hello, stranger’ or mellow greeting of any kind. All they did was stare. And their stares became all the more intrusive the closer I got to them.

  All three were middle-aged and had average to semi-muscular builds. They all wore T-shirts and jeans and had farmer’s tans evident on their forearms.

  The one behind the counter had begun staring me down like I had stolen something from him. I approached the counter, smiled, and placed my hands on it.

  “Something I can help you with?” the counter man asked, reaching for the cash register drawer. It had been sitting open to this point; a pile of small bills, mostly ones and fives, along with several rolls of quarters lay inside.

  I tried offering him an innocent look, not exactly my cup of tea. “Yes, sir, I’m hoping you can.” I jutted my thumb over my shoulder at the Denali. “The wife and I are in dire need of some gas for that land yacht out there. Guess we forgot to fill her up last evening.”

  He took a long time to respond. “Is that so?”

  I nodded to him. “We’re headed west, and everywhere else we’ve stopped has either been out of gas, out of power, or both.”

  “Is that so?” he repeated in a grumble.

  The man to my right began his interrogation with a look of indignance painted on his crusty countenance. “Headed west?” He let out a grunt. “You and everybody else. Don’t suppose you’ve noticed, stranger, but the whole goddamn world is falling apart today.”

  I glanced at him and nodded. “Oh, I’ve noticed. A plane crashed not far away from where we were staying yesterday.”

  “They’ve been crashing all over. One crash-landed on the mountain just up the road from here last evening,” the counter man said. “Killed quite a lot of people, from what I heard.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Look, I’m fairly certain, in lieu of our current predicament, the price of gas has gone up, and I don’t have a problem paying you whatever you ask for it. In fact, I’d be willing to make it worth your while. I have cash. Just name your price.”

  “Name my price?” He chuckled, then leaned over the counter, placing his face a little too close to mine. “Suppose I decided to charge you five hundred dollars a gallon? What say you
then, stranger? How’s that for a price?”

  The counter man’s breath smelled like the sulphur of overcooked hard-boiled eggs, chewing tobacco, and homemade rye whiskey. I expected the bouquet to be accompanied with eau de rotten teeth, but it hadn’t. His fangs had either rotted out long ago or been knocked out by someone. On any normal day, that someone could have very easily been me. “I’d say that makes you a businessman. I’m a businessman myself. I understand the law of supply and demand. We all must do what we feel necessary to survive, especially during a crisis. Now, my truck out there has a twenty-six-gallon tank. At your price, that makes it, what, about thirteen grand to fill me up?”

  The man chuckled again and sucked on his gums. “Sounds about right.”

  “Cash all right with you? I’m all out of personal checks.”

  The counter man guffawed. “You a high roller, stranger? It’s kind of dangerous to be toting around a bankroll that size, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not anything. Just somebody who needs some gas,” I said. “Someone who’s offering you money for the gas you have. Now, do we have a deal, or do I need to take my business elsewhere?”

  The man on the left, who had yet to make his presence known, took a wide step away from the counter. “I think you’re forgetting a few things,” he growled. “There’s a few other options available to us worth mentioning.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “Such as, we forget about the deal altogether.”

  I sighed. “There is that.”

  “Yep. We say screw your deal and we just take your truck, keep our gas, and kindly relieve you of all your fucking money.” He lifted his shirt to present a chrome-plated 1911 .45-caliber pistol in an appendix-carry holster. He tapped his fingers on the handle while he eyeballed me, like a gunfighter challenging me to a duel. “Then we tie your ass inside that eyesore truck of yours and bury you alive in it somewhere.”

  I couldn’t tell which of these three hillbillies was the drunkest. The trio had apparently decided to get together for some stress relief upon learning of the attacks. Perhaps it had escalated a bit for them when the power went off. Little did they know that at the point of presenting and threatening me with a loaded weapon, it was nearing the point of escalating for them yet again.