Crash Landing: Survival in a Dystopian World (BONES BOOK ONE 1)

by Jim Rudnick

  Javor nodded. He told them to get in, and then he slowly pulled the truck out of the row it was in and turned to his left.

  Moving toward the piled-up dollies, he stopped long enough to get Wayne into the cab after he closed the vertical rear door, and he looked at everyone.

  “We’re going straight out. I’m turning left toward the gate, and then I’ll cut across the grass, over the tracks, and then left out the huge hole in the fence, back to Walkerville. Okay with that?”

  “We got time to get a pool on how many zombies you run over,” Wayne said with a smile, and everyone laughed.

  Javor gunned the engine.

  She ran fine, he thought, as he slowly pushed up against the dollies that quickly rolled out of his way as he left the building. Zombies too were moved mostly outward and away, but some did fall, and yet he didn’t feel that bad about them. They’d kill me if they had a chance.

  At the edge of the road, he spun the wheel to the left as Sue sitting beside him grabbed his arm and pointed back to the right toward the barracks area they’d just left.

  Down about a hundred yards stood some more zombies—but they were neatly dressed, Javor thought. They were standing still and watching the truck. They were talking among themselves and Sue nodded.

  “Ah, the smart zombies who’re running this base,” she surmised and waved him on.

  Javor turned the wheel more sharply, goosed the truck, and left the base behind … over the grass, through the fence, and back toward Walkerville.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Climbing back up the off-ramp had been no problem at all for the truck. It made the climb easily yet he had to use a three-point turn to get going back to the east up top. They were calling the truck Nutty because of the advertisement on the side, and they were asking him to boot it so that they could go faster. He’d reminded them three times that fuel was their major concern and slow and steady would make their supply last longer. Bruce griped about that and said that at least once every ten miles or so, he should get her up to fifty miles an hour and that got support, but Javor nixed that idea. Bruce and Wayne, who sat behind in the crew cab area with Bixby sitting up between them, grumbled.

  Sue nodded and agreed.

  Fuel longevity was something to be concerned with, so that was that.

  Still, on some miles of the interstate ahead, where the roads had been clean and garbage free, he did get her up to about forty or so, and that made the miles and scenery fly by.

  Off to the north was the start of the rolling hills leading to the mountains from which that nor’wester had come, while down to their right, the southern landscape was totally different. Here, the valleys opened up and farm after farm and woodlot after woodlot were all they could see. Smaller county roads were covered with gravel and sometimes a wreckage of cars and trucks too. At one point, Bruce said, “Hey, look at all them tractors” when they passed a small town with a tractor dealership. Parked in rows like soldiers on parade, the tractors’ orange paint was still shiny in the late afternoon sun.

  “What’s ahead?” Javor asked Sue, who stopped staring at the interstate scenery and nodded to him.

  “Sign back there said nine miles to Adair, which is a smaller town like Maxwell, off to the north. We gotta get off the interstate to not miss it, then go north through town to the river, and then upriver about another five miles to the Adair Dam. Once we’re there, the power station will know early as they’ll surely hear Nutty coming, and we’ll get entry into their grounds. Fully fortified and protected too ... so no zombies either and won’t be using these,” she said as she patted her rifle that lay beside her.

  Javor grunted and watched the roadway ahead. Twice, he slowed a bit more to twist the truck across the three lanes to avoid car and truck pileups, and once, Bruce, Wayne, and Sue had to get out to wrestle some timber and beams off the one lane so that he could get through there too. Ahead, the interstate was pretty clear, and he gunned it all the way up to almost sixty and had the boys and Sue laughing at such speeds.

  He grinned. Might have cost us a cup of gasoline, but the hell with it.

  At the the off-ramp ahead, the sign read Town of Adair, and he angled the truck over to the right to slow and look down first.

  Blocked.

  There had been a big smashup of vehicles—trucks and what looked like a whole raft of those orange tractors on a carrier too. There was no way that Nutty would get by, and he told them so and backed up to go ahead to the on-ramp.

  Once there, again he had to use a three-point turn to face back to the west, but it was clear at least, and down he went slowly, the truck mostly rolling on its own. At the bottom, he rolled right on through the intersection, around two cars and over the curb, and then took a hard right to get underneath the interstate. As the truck went on, Javor moved it carefully around the occasional vehicle still on the road and reached the next large intersection ahead. There, Sue said, “Take a right,” and he did that. They slowly went down the regional road toward the town still miles ahead.

  On the south side, the interstate continued its one hundred feet in the air and the valley lay below as the regional roadway slowly climbed the rolling hills to Adair.

  On the north side sat a few farms, woodlots, and even a gas station too, which had been almost burned to the ground. In the far distance, Javor saw what looked like a school with several buses lined up outside.

  After less than another hundred feet, Bruce asked him to stop for a moment. He did so, and as he turned to ask why, he saw that Bruce had opened up his door and was standing on the door sill, looking off to the left of the truck. Javor was about to ask why when the sound of Bruce’s rifle exploded twice.

  Bam! Bam!

  And then Bruce got back into the rear seat.

  “Zombies and now there’s two less,” he said, “but before you all give me hell, I had to just test the sights once more after that dang ambush back in Walkerville. Sorry,” he offered.

  Sue grunted and said, “Let’s go.”

  Javor did just that but asked, “How far away were those two, Bruce?”

  “Sights have various pre-sets, and that was at 300 yards—accurate too—I like this weapon,” he added.

  Javor grunted. Three hundred yards is like three throws of my javelin. He sighed and went back to watching carefully for the road and anything in their way.

  “Okay,” Sue said, “here, we gotta go to the left.” She pointed left ahead where the regional road split at a T-intersection.

  Javor negotiated that, and the truck slowly climbed the grade ahead for almost a half mile as the town of Adair rose up ahead. He looked and watched carefully as they crept along at ten miles an hour. An hour ago, he’d realized that the truck had only the four tires that were on it—there were no spares—and if he’d been thinking a bit better back at the Motor Pool, he’d have tried to find some spares to toss in the back too. But he hadn’t and so he watched the road ahead with a higher degree of caution than he’d planned. Least the cadre members hadn’t thought of that too, so far. He half-smirked to himself, and as the truck crept up the final bit of grade at the top of the last intersection coming into town, he stopped in the middle of same.

  “So, this is Adair,” he said and was not impressed.

  Again, the town had angle parking on both sides of the main street ahead—downtown he would call it. It really wasn’t much of a city center. Some of the cars were just empty hulks, while a couple looked fairly nice still. Two orange tractors sat askew on a stage on the left with a torn and ratty banner advertising the big draw to win them at the upcoming Fall Fair—but that was from eight years ago. Someone had broken almost every single window in town, and someone else had torched the big diner on the street corner too. Part of the frontage of a five-and-dime store was hanging down onto the wide sidewalk area with hundreds and hundreds of books lying there too.

  Wonder who’s gonna read them, Javor thought.

  “Not much of a town, but then eight years after
the Boathi, guess we’re all lucky just to see it,” Sue said ruefully, and they all nodded.

  Javor put the truck back into drive and moved ahead, taking a cautious path down the center of the main drag. He was careful to try to avoid the big pile of glass that was ahead too. Looks like someone had sat and looked at those tractors and drank a whole boatload of beer—and then had smashed the empties right there too. Two patio chairs were still set up to face the stage, and Javor wondered if he could sit and look back those years and not break the empties either. Nope, couldn’t do that either. He drove around the big brown smashed bottles and went farther down the street.

  What he thought was the town’s city hall was ahead of them. It was an older style of architecture and made from nice gray rock with some columns out front, but the dome above had fallen into disrepair and had holes in its shell. On the front lawn—or what might have been lawn years ago—lay dozens of skeletons. All were lying with remnants of some kind of body bags dissolved around them. All, he figured, had been deposited there when the virus bombs fell and the collection of bodies had begun.

  He shook his head and raised an eyebrow at Sue.

  She nodded. “We were told that, yeah, when the first virus victims were killed, that you had to take your dead in yourself to the authorities so that they could then test them to see from what it was they’d died. Not ‘til everyone started to die within a month or two more, did someone not bother as the lab guys who were to do the testing started dying and so here they lay,” she said.

  Sad that this still lay in tribute to what the Bones governments had tried to do—but had failed—as the Boathi virus bombs had been so successful.

  He drove on farther past what looked like the perfectly okay post office, past the big department store, and two motor hotels too, the signs stated. He followed the road as it jogged to first the left and then the right, past a big box store parking lot with hundreds of vehicles all neatly parked. He looked past them to the stores themselves, and while he didn’t recognize any of the brand names, he knew what a shoe store or a home decoration store looked like, and he just shook his head.

  Sue pointed at the next intersection and said, “Take a right here, all the way out to the edge of town to the power substation.”

  He nodded and in less than five minutes, the truck eased up at the securely locked front gate of the Adair power station. “More than a football field big,” he said to himself, “fully fenced with huge transformers and rows of marching towers that held the current wires and moved the power elsewhere.”

  He knew enough to note that there didn’t appear to be any incoming power lines, but he could easily identify the lightning arresters, the enormous step-down transformer, and the voltage regulators. That he’d learned about them more than thirty years ago or so back on his home world during a summer job meant little now—but this station did have the hum he’d always heard when power was being controlled, and that meant someone ran this station.

  Sue asked, “Does Nutty have a horn?”

  He grinned at her and pressed down hard on the center of the steering wheel.

  BEEP … BEEP … BEEP!

  And then they waited.

  From a small building ahead, three men exited, and two carried rifles pointed generally in their direction.Sue said, “Let me get this,” opened up the door, and stepped down, unarmed.

  She held up her hands, palms toward the three men who were now standing still only thirty feet away but behind the big fence gate, and said, “Hello—we’re from Maxwell—we’re with the Regime.” She stood still to let them look at her.

  One of the men spoke to the other two, and the three men walked up to cut the distance down between them and Sue.

  “Easy to say—can we ask if we contact the Regime on ham radio that you have a code that they’d accept?” one asked, his hands just tucked into his belt. About thirty years old, he had a big bushy ginger beard. He wore boots, rough jeans, and a matching jean jacket.

  “Can we see everyone, please? Plus the truck? Where did you find a working vehicle?” he asked, and while he took care with his question, Javor could tell the truck was more important than they were.

  Sue nodded and waved at them all, and everyone left their arms in the truck and got out. Javor did not bother to remove his Colt so it sat on his hip, but the three men ahead either didn’t notice or didn’t care. One of them, he noted though, pointed his rifle a bit closer to him, and that made sense, even if it was uncomfortable.

  Sue said, “Yes, our code is Maxwell four, twenty-five, ninety-three—the day the bombs fell. Please send that over ham radio, and we’ll wait.

  One of the men ahead pointed behind the truck, said something, and the lead power station man, the ginger, said, “You’re pulling in a crowd, so let’s get you through the gate first, okay?” as he motioned behind them.

  Javor turned to look, and coming down the road still quite a bit back were zombies. Dumb zombies, it appeared, but at least a couple of dozen, and as he turned back, Sue nodded and he hoisted himself back up into the cab of the truck.

  One of the three power station men went over to a panel on a wall inside the fence, and the huge gate ahead of them powered up and slid out of the way.

  Driving the truck inside was easy, and he put it down the road and off to one side where the other power station fellow indicated. Javor climbed out of the truck along with Bixby who’d been asleep.

  He barked once and then was quiet as Javor threw him a whole jerky bar, and he gnawed on that.

  The leader spoke. “A truck—a working truck. A dog. Code that will validate you too perhaps—are there any other surprises you might have?” he asked.

  They all turned to walk back toward the big building that was off to one side of the substation, and Javor wondered what the man would think if he were to say that yes, he wasn’t from Bones either … but best to let Sue decide that one.

  #####

  Bixby wasn’t a happy camper when he was put in the back of the truck so that one of the power substation men could accompany them the few more miles to the dam itself. He kept up a longish story of what the issues were at the dam and how the penstock needed cleaning every three months and how the extra spillway that those goddamn Boathi bombs had missed should’a been hit too.

  All in all, the story was what anyone would hear from workers anywhere on any kind of job, Javor thought.

  Sue smiled every so often when she’d say something like “No, really?” or even “Tell me what that is?”

  As the truck slowly climbed the narrow two-lane road carved right out of the side of the small mountain ahead, the river below them ran fast with large ripples and sprays from rocks along the watercourse. That recent nor’wester had come down with so much rain that the river was running brown where the current was the slowest—silt, mud, and dirt all washing down from the massive storm.

  The side of the mountain above the road was thick with fir trees that rose all the way to the top. The thick forests had not been trimmed or looked after as the road often had small piles of scrub and fall-downs that were merely pushed off the narrow lanes of the road.

  The lightning from that storm had also struck a few of the tallest trees, and some still smoldered with black sooty smoke. The rain from the storm must have been just enough to prevent a forest fire.

  Road maintenance was obviously something that wasn’t a priority, Javor thought, as he carefully threaded the truck around the piles and kept slowly climbing the slope of the road ahead of them.

  At the top of the next rise, the road angled down and to the right a bit, and they could see the dam. Or maybe what was left of the dam would be a better way to think of the view ahead. The Boathi bombs had fallen right on target it looked like, as the height of the dam had been cut down by at least a hundred feet. What was left of the dam that was not blown up stretched across the six hundred feet of river it held back, and it still did that just fine. Where there had been six spillways in the major part
of the dam, only concrete rubble and debris remained. From where the truck sat above the dam, Javor could see one spillway off to the far right was full of river water pouring down into the generating plant area.

  Even from this far away, Javor could see, something was wrong at the far right of the spillway.

  As he slipped the truck into low, to take it easy down the hill, he saw a big mass of fallen floating fir trees that seemed to be caught at the edge of that far spillway. Above that mass of needles and branches, a large, long crane stretched out to sit right above that area, coming from the dam grounds maintenance area. Next to that, he could just see a small inflatable boat caught by the spillway metal grates too, its outboard tossing up a big rooster tail as it went nowhere but stayed off to one side, caught by another of those trees.

  The truck hit a couple of ruts, and Bixby barked loudly as he got tossed about a bit, but Javor still went ahead at a greater speed than he first thought prudent. Sue could now see the turmoil below and she egged him on.

  I know little about dams, he thought, but enough to know that the rushing water spins a turbine that is hooked up to a generator that generates electricity and moves it to a transformer and then out to power lines. And spillways that lead the water to the turbines have metal grates to protect the equipment from logs and the like.

  “Least that’s what happens on a real dam—perhaps not one that has been hit by the Boathi,” he said to himself.

  At the bottom of the slope, they turned a hard right at another high frost wire fence gate, and a couple of men came running out and one of them whistled.

  “Wow, a truck! A real live moving truck,” he said and whistled yet again.

  “We’ve got issues here—two men are caught in the spillway grates,” the second one said, as they turned back to run the hundred yards across the top of the dam and to the area directly under the crane.

  As soon as he could, Javor parked and turned off the truck. He pressed the open tailgate button that would free Bixby and got out of the cab to run to the area himself. He was followed by the others ,and when Sue arrived, she yanked on one of the men’s coat sleeves and said, “Effram—it’s me, Sue, from Maxwell … can we help?”