“So you must be really smart, then?”
Rob laughed. “I don’t know how smart I was. I wasn’t taking to the law life that well. I was bored, so I quit. One day, I just walked out of the office. I remember walking down the street, taking off my tie and tossing it into the gutter. One of the firm partners called me and asked where the hell I was. You see, I had clients I was supposed to be meeting with.”
“But you just walked off?”
Rob laughed again. “That’s right, just walked the hell out of there. I told them I was quitting. They told me I had another five years before I’d get any kind of pension at all. I told them they could keep it. I walked right down the street to the bar, went on a bender for a week.”
“A bender?”
“I wasn’t a drunk, but that week I drank more than I probably have in my whole life.”
Dan didn’t know what to say. He’d never even touched alcohol. “How’d you get out of that?”
“Next thing I knew, the buzz wore off and I was working as a garbage man in the city. So I said what the hell and I worked there for another five years.”
“Then what happened?”
“The EMP happened, that’s what. I liked working sanitation. It was a hell of a lot better than being a lawyer, as far as I was concerned. Out in the fresh air. Well, it wasn’t always so fresh, but you get used to the smell after a while. I got to enjoy the sunshine, the rain, just about everything. Beats working in an office.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever be stuck in an office again,” said Dan.
Rob laughed. “I thought you didn’t have a sense of humor, kid,” he said. “But you’re surprising me at every turn. Come on, let’s see what this house has to offer. Maybe we can scrounge up some food.”
Rob checked the pulse of the woman before they left the room, saying that she looked like she was doing fine and that the wound hadn’t started bleeding again.
Not much light entered the rest of the house, since all the blinds were drawn, and Rob said it’d be best to keep them that way. But gradually their eyes got accustomed to the lower levels of light.
Most of the house looked like it had been completely untouched. There were only a couple isolated spots where some evidence of commotion could be seen. One of the upstairs bedrooms had clothes spread out all over the floor.
“Looks like they were in a hurry to leave their house,” said Rob, gently kicking at the clothing with his boot.
Many of the dresser drawers were opened. One of the had even been removed completely from the dresser and it now lay on the floor.
“What do you think happened to the people who lived here?” said Dan. “Where’d they all go?”
“Everyone was worried that someone was invading,” said Rob. “That was the word on the street around here when the EMP first hit. If their car happened to still work, then they left in that. If it didn’t, they got a ride with whoever’d take them. Or they left by foot. People were desperate.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“It’s a long story,” said Rob, a look of sadness crossing his face. “Let’s not go into that now.”
Dan didn’t want to intrude too much. He figured it was something personal. Maybe Rob had lost someone important to him. He hadn’t asked about Rob’s family, and Rob hadn’t mentioned anyone.
“Why are some of the cars working and some aren’t?” said Dan. “I thought they’d all be knocked out of commission.”
“So you know how an EMP works?” said Rob, an eyebrow rising in surprise.
“Doesn’t everyone, at this point?”
“I’ve met a lot who haven’t.”
“I heard about it at the hardware store where I used to work,” said Dan. “One of the guys there was always talking about it. Most people didn’t pay any attention to him. They said he was paranoid and all that. But I’d listen to his stories sometimes.”
Rob nodded. “So I don’t know either why some vehicles are affected and others aren’t.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Frankly, it’s been the least of my worries. But now that you ask, I guess everyone has their own idea about how something like an EMP is supposed to work, and then reality turns out to be much different.”
“Makes sense,” said Dan. “Hey, check this out.”
They’d just entered the kitchen, which stank of rotting trash, and Dan had started opening cupboards at random. Some of them were just filled with dishes, as well as pots and pans. Normal kitchen stuff for the most part. But one of them was full of packaged food.
There were boxes of crackers, boxes of pasta, cans of tuna fish, smoked oysters. All sorts of non-perishable foods.
Rob started clicking his tongue. “Looks like we’re in luck,” he said, grabbing as much of it as he could in his arms. “See if there’s any silverware in one of the drawers.”
Sure enough, Dan found forks, knives, and spoons neatly arranged in one of the drawers, just as they would have been in his own house.
“Let’s have ourselves a little feast,” said Rob, settling down in one of the kitchen chairs, dumping the food onto the table, and immediately going for the oysters. He pulled the tab back on the top of the tin, greedily grabbed a fork from Dan, and speared one of the smoked oysters on his fork. He held it there in front of his face for a long moment, apparently savoring the idea of eating it before actually put it in his mouth. “I’ve always loved oysters,” he said, before devouring the oyster in a single bite. “Wish we had some hot sauce.”
“This is great we’ve got some food,” said Dan, still standing. He was starting to feel nervous again, about the possibility of someone getting into the house.
“Come on, kid, sit down and eat something. You’ll feel better.”
“Yeah,” said Dan. “I will. But shouldn’t we be on the lookout for more of the scrounger people?”
Rob nodded with his mouth full. “Yeah,” he said, once he’d finished chewing. He’d already eaten almost the entire tin of oysters, and was now preparing to drink down the oil that they’d been soaking in. “We should. But like I said, we can’t leave with her in that condition. So there’s nothing to do for now but wait. And while we wait, we might as well eat.”
“What are we going to do if they try to break in here? They were just trying to break in next door, after all.”
“We’ll fight when the time comes, if it comes,” said Rob, who’d moved onto a package of salted crackers. “Here, you’d better eat something. Don’t worry, we’ll save something for her too, for when she wakes up.”
Dan was a little thrown off by Rob’s cavalier attitude, but he realized that there really wasn’t any way they could mount a proper watch on the house. Putting one of them outside was too risky. And if one of them was upstairs, looking out one of the windows, it’d be obvious from whoever was approaching on the street.
What was more, there were only two of them. And there were four directions they could be approached from.
Maybe Rob was right. The best notice they could get that someone had arrived was sound, the sound of someone breaking a window or trying to break a door. Rob had locked the door behind them, so unless the next scrounger had a lock pick kit and some skill, they’d hear whoever it was.
Dan sat down opposite Rob, and Rob passed him the crackers. Dan ate them with relish, shoving many of them in his mouth at once.
“I didn’t realize how hungry I was,” said Dan, speaking with his mouth full of food.
“That’s the way it goes,” said Rob. “It’s the adrenaline. It rises when we’re hungry, and it keeps our hunger away. But it does it by breaking down muscle tissue to turn into glucose. It’s called gluconeogenesis.”
Dan nodded, but he wasn’t really listening that carefully, and he wasn’t sure he’d understand if he had been. The important thing now was food. Eating it. Not understanding how near-starvation worked.
Dan quickly moved on from crackers to a tin of tuna, which had a quick-open top to it. The first bite in his mouth, i
t seemed as if nothing had ever tasted so good. And Dan didn’t even like tuna. In fact, he’d never liked seafood of any kind before. Until now, that was.
“You think we should go check on her?” said Dan, reaching for a jar of unopened peanut butter. He’d never thought that he’d be so interested in eating peanut butter. He’d always hated it. Up until now, that is, when it meant plenty of concentrated calories.
Rob shook his head. “In a minute,” he said. “She’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
“You’ve done a surgery like that before, then?”
“A couple of them,” said Rob, vaguely. “Some of them worked out, some didn’t.”
With his stomach starting to get full, Dan felt like he had enough courage to ask Rob what had happened to him right after the EMP.
“How did you survive this long?” said Dan, speaking more abruptly than he would have liked.
Rob eyed him for a moment without saying anything. For a second, Dan was worried he’d caused a tense moment. After all, he’d just met Rob, even though it felt, in some ways, that they’d known each other much longer. Probably because of what they’d been through already.
Rob shrugged. “I just kept on going,” he said. “That’s about the best anyone can do.” He opened up a package of cookies, and started flipping through them with his fingers, apparently trying to find and select the biggest cookie of them all. “So what’s your plan, kid? Is there any point in asking where you’re headed, if you’ve got any plans? Or are you simply on the run, living from day to day like the rest of us?”
Dan found himself talking more than he had in a long time. Maybe it was the food, or maybe it was just having company. His grandfather had been sick at the end, uttering only a few words here and there. Dan had spent most of his time since the EMP in worried, panicked silence.
Dan told Rob about his grandfather, about the trucks he’d seen. He told him about waiting and waiting, not knowing what was going on. He told him about the voice on the radio that he’d gotten working, a man named Max, who had a camp setup. He told him about the soldiers, about his friend from the hardware store who’d died. He told him about the man that he’d killed, and he told him about how the injured woman had saved his life, and then how Rob had saved it again.
“So this Max, what happened with him?”
“I don’t know,” said Dan. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to him again. But I know where his camp is.”
“So that’s where you’re headed?”
“If I can get there, yeah,” said Dan. “But I don’t know if I can really make it. I lost my pack. I lost the gear I had. I’d barely gotten far from my house when those soldiers picked me up. I wasn’t strong enough. I didn’t have a gun… I did what I could. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it all the way north to where Max is.”
“What kind of setup does this Max have?” said Rob.
“Oh, I don’t know exactly. It doesn’t sound like anything really advanced or anything.”
“So what’s the reason to head there?”
“Well, he’s out in the woods, away from all the chaos. About as much as you can be, I suppose. And there are deer there, plenty of them.”
“So they’ve got food, then?”
“Sounds like it. Not like this, of course,” said Dan, gesturing to the spread of packaged food laid out on the table between them.
“More nutritious, though,” said Rob. “All natural. That’s the real way to eat.”
Dan nodded, not really knowing what Rob was talking about.
“And how many of them are out there at this camp of Max’s?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. Half a dozen or so? Max kept it all pretty close to his chest with that kind of stuff.” Keeping something close to your chest was an expression Dan had heard his grandfather use from time to time.
“Sounds like a smart guy,” said Rob, who then fell silent, except for chewing some crackers, and cracking open another tin of smoked oysters.
“You seem like you’re lost in thought,” said Dan, after a few minutes.
“Maybe I am, kid,” said Rob. “You want to know what I was thinking?”
“What?”
“I was wondering if Max would have room for three more at this camp of his, if it still exists, that is.”
“You mean you’d come with me?”
“Why not? I don’t have long left living the way I’m living now. With every house I break into, I know it could be my last. I’ve had too many close calls already. I’d thought about getting out, into the woods somewhere, but it seemed too hard to do on my own. But a small community, banding together, that’s the real way to do it.”
Dan found himself smiling widely. For the first time in days, he felt like he had some hope.
If Rob was coming along, he was sure they’d be able to get to the camp. No matter what it took. Rob was big and strong. He had a gun. Dan was just a small little lost kid.
“What did you mean about if it’s still there?” said Dan, suddenly wondering what Rob had meant.
“Well, let’s just not get our hopes up too much. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about life since the EMP, it’s that nothing’s permanent.”
Dan felt his stomach sinking a little, but he shoved a couple more salted crackers into his mouth to make up for it.
12
Georgia
Georgia hadn’t seen any deer that morning. Maybe she’d gone out too late. She didn’t have a watch, and she had to guess the time based on the sun. It wasn’t hard to do, but it was difficult to be more exact than within a couple hours.
She was trudging on back to the camp. She’d ended up walking deeper into the woods than she’d initially intended. But when she hadn’t seen any signs of deer, she’d decided, almost unconsciously, to press on and on.
Georgia was out of breath. Her back was hurting her, throbbing with pain. She’d never had a lick of back pain before getting shot. She didn’t know if it was from the actual injury or the impromptu surgery that’d been done in the back of a moving vehicle.
She hadn’t mentioned the back pain to anyone. For one thing, she couldn’t complain about a surgery that had saved her life. But the main thing was that Georgia didn’t want anyone to know that she was still in pain, that she wasn’t as strong as she was pretending to be.
Sure, she was better than she had been. By a long shot. But aside from the back pain, the place where she’d been shot still occasionally throbbed with pain. She hadn’t figured out if there were certain ways of moving her body that made it worse or better.
So she’d decided to try to ignore it. Pretend it wasn’t there.
She knew that Max’s leg still gave him problems, and she never saw him talk about that.
But it was something deeper, something deep inside Georgia. Ever since she’d been a kid, she’d been independent. She’d always been strong. When she’d become a mother, she’d only gotten stronger. She’d had to be for her kids. There hadn’t been any other way.
Georgia could deal with the pain fairly well, but it hard to fight against the weakness that seemed to consume her whole body. The weakness wasn’t as overwhelming as it had been weeks earlier. She was stronger now, but maybe she’d pushed herself too far.
As she walked back to camp, she found her feet almost dragging on the ground. She found herself walking slower and slower.
OK. She had to take a break. No one was around to see her do it.
She sat down, leaning her back against a thick tree trunk.
She kept her rifle out and ready, laying it sideways across her stretched-out legs.
Since she hadn’t sat in proper furniture for weeks and weeks now, a tree felt almost like a luxury whereas before the EMP, she would have mentally complained about the hardness, the ridges in the bark. She would have felt how uncomfortable it all was. Of course, she would have never voiced any of this. But it was still there, inside her.
The forest was quiet and calm. Georgia took a deep breath of th
e fresh air.
She’d rarely noticed just how polluted the air had been back in the suburbs. People talked about city pollution, but it was everywhere too. It was just that people didn’t normally have anything to compare it to.
Before the EMP, sometimes, coming back from a hunting trip, Georgia could tell the difference. But it didn’t last long, the memory of the fresh forest air faded quickly as normal life and its obligations quickly took over. Sadie and James had needed to get to school. Georgia’d needed to get to her various jobs, clean the house, cook for the kids. She’d rarely had any time for herself, except on those hunting trips.
Georgia wondered how the air was now back in the suburbs, and even the cities. Would the thin, almost imperceptible, smog just slowly fade away? There couldn’t be many cars and trucks still operating. And slowly all the remaining engines would either grind down into disrepair, or remain rusting somewhere as gas become impossible to obtain.
The woods were calm and peaceful. Georgia breathed a sigh of relief. The pain was better now that she was sitting.
It wasn’t too cold. Just a bit of a chill to the air.
Soon enough it’d be spring, and the trees would be green once again. There’d be wild flowers blossoming and the air would have that sweet freshness.
Life had been hard since the EMP. Nearly impossible. There’d been so many moments where it had seemed like it was finally the end that Georgia had completely lost count of them.
But maybe things would settle down. The country, and maybe the whole world, was going through a difficult change, a complete upheaval of the established order. After that, when the dust settled, maybe they’d be left with a calm, peaceful life.
If it hadn’t been for the violence, the struggle to survive, Georgia probably would have preferred the simple, natural life, compared to life in the suburbs. She’d only been there because of the kids. They’d needed a good education.
Georgia took another deep breath of the fresh, cool air, savoring the taste and feeling of it as she held it in her lungs.
Getting Home_A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller Page 7