by D. Gideon
Marco leaned forward. “We should clear out of here before Todd volunteers us to put up plastic,” he said.
“Good idea,” I said, nodding. Corey turned and started weaving his way through the crowd, the three of us following in his wake. We made it to the stairwell without Todd noticing, and Josh turned on his headlamp as we started up.
“Rip, you know we’re staying in your room tonight, right?” Corey asked.
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “You guys get to take that up with Mel when she gets back. Speaking of which…” I turned at the landing and kept going. “We need to talk about what we’re doing when she does get back. Are we staying in case this is just a freak outage that’ll last a couple of days, or are we leaving?”
“If this is a CME like I think it is, it’s not going to be a couple of days,” Josh said. “If my Dad isn’t here to pick me up by eight-o-clock tomorrow night, I’m heading home. Best-case scenario, this all gets fixed and he drives me back in time for classes on Tuesday.”
“Why eight?” Marco asked.
“That’s our plan. If something happened, like suicide bombers or someone flying planes into the White House or something, I hunker down and give him 24 hours to drive out here and get me. If he’s not there by then, I start making my way home.”
“What if you leave and he’s on his way? He’ll get here and you’ll be gone,” I said.
Josh shook his head, making the light from his headlamp bounce around the stairwell. “He knows the route I’ll be taking. We’ll both be leaving markers. We should meet up, but if we pass each other, my markers will let him know to turn around. If I see one of his markers, I stop and wait for him to backtrack to me.”
“What kind of markers?” I asked.
“Lumber markers. Like big crayons that lumberjacks use to mark on trees. I’ve got yellow, and my Dad’s got red.”
“That’s pretty friggin’ genius,” Corey said. “Rip, we should’ve thought of that.”
“We don’t have anyone coming to get us,” I reminded him. “We always planned on having my Bug.”
“I can’t believe you guys planned for this kind of thing at all,” Marco said. “In Europe, sure. Bad things happen all the time there. But here in America? College kids making plans to get home after a terrorist attack?”
Marco stopped, staring straight ahead, mouth slightly open. “Shit,” he said.
We all stopped and looked back at him.
“What?” Corey asked.
“I just realized — I don’t have anywhere to go,” Marco said. “I don’t even have a car to get me to the airport. I can’t buy a ticket home with no power-”
“We got ya covered, man,” Corey said. “Rip and I figured you and Mel would be coming back to our place.”
Marco blinked and gave Corey a confused look. “Rip mentioned she was taking Mel, but… me too?”
“Of course you too,” I said. “If Mel can’t get to California, you really think you’re gonna get to Portugal? You think we’d just leave you here?”
“I… I never considered any of it,” Marco said. “This kind of thing never happens here. You sure that would be alright? Us just showing up at your house?”
I waved a hand and started climbing again. “Mel’s been to my house a few times already. Grams said to ask if you wanted to come out for Thanksgiving break this year. This just makes it a little sooner, is all.”
Josh caught up to me, and I heard Corey and Marco start moving again. After a moment, Marco chuckled a bit.
“Uh-oh,” Corey said.
“Ripley,” Marco began, an exaggerated tone of mischief in his voice.
“I don’t want to know, Marco,” I called back, a smile already on my face.
“This is just your way of getting me home to meet your parents, isn’t it? You know, all you had to do was ask…”
I groaned. “Yeah Romeo, this is all a cleverly disguised attempt to see if my parents approve of you. I arranged for the entire city to have a blackout just so I could get you to my house.”
“I can’t wait to see your bedroom,” Marco said. I could hear his grin. “I bet it’s all pink, and frilly…your secret feminine side tucked away…with teddy bears…”
I turned and pointed at Corey. “He’s staying at your house,” I said.
Corey was grinning ear to ear. “You mean if you don’t kill him on the way there.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, turning and sprinting up to the next landing. We’d finally made it to the sixth floor. “I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I bet you’ve got butterflies hanging from the ceiling,” Marco said.
“Oh, man,” Corey said. “Get the backhoe, he’s digging for China.”
“You really want to die, don’t you, Vicente?” Josh said, laughing.
“Just wait until I go through that pack of yours and start throwing stuff out,” I warned. “I’m going through your closet, too. You’re going to hate me before we even get started.”
Marco nudged Corey. “See? She’s thought of dressing me,” he said. “She’s going to fashion me into her perfect man.”
“That’s it. I’m throwing all of your underwear out of that broken window,” I said, pushing through the stairway door. Josh hurried to keep up with me.
“You wouldn’t really do that, would you?” He said, grinning.
I just flashed Josh an evil smile, wiggled my eyebrows, and started jogging for their room.
CHAPTER 6
Saturday, September 1st
College Park, Maryland
“Where the hell did these people learn how to drive? Massachusetts? Haven’t they heard of right-of-way?”
Melanie Rhodes slammed her hand on the horn as another car darted in front of her in the intersection, nearly clipping her front bumper. The traffic lights, along with everything else relying on power, weren’t working.
“People are going cray-zay,” Amy agreed, turning around in the passenger seat. “Look at that! It’s headlights backed up as far as I can see!”
Mel edged the nose of the big Suburban into the intersection, watching for more idiots. When she was sure they were finally letting her go—the other three lanes had each belched out at least a dozen cars without giving her a turn—she hit the gas and pulled through the intersection as quickly as she could.
“I’ve got half a mind to swing out to the airport and give that little geek at the rental desk a night he won’t forget,” Mel said, glancing into the rearview mirror. “I rode that boy’s ass up and down when he told me all the sports cars had been rented out already. Can you imagine being in a little sports car right now?”
“I hear ya,” Amy said, turning back around in her seat and flipping her dyed red hair over one shoulder. “We’d have probably been run over five times by now if we were in my car.”
“It’s already been hours,” Stephanie said from behind Amy. Her voice was weak and shaky, making Mel glance into the rearview mirror again. “Going out to the airport would take-”
“I was joking, Steph. Look, it’s only a couple blocks to Campus Drive,” Mel said. “We could just park it and walk.”
“Speak for yourself,” came a tired voice from directly behind Mel. Chloe was staring out the window, the quiver of her soft spiral curls the only hint that she was shaking. “I’m not getting out of this truck until my ass is safe.”
“You and me both, girl,” rasped Leandra, from where she was laying in the third seat.
Stephanie shook her head. “Chloe, what makes you think it’s any safer on the campus than it’s been out here?”
Chloe turned and gave Stephanie a hard look. “Because there’s rich white kids there.”
Amy snorted. “Having me and Steph in the truck should’ve kept those guys from trying to get into the truck earlier, then.”
“No,” Leandra said, pronouncing it more like “naw”. She sat up and leaned in between the second seats. “Out here it don’t make no difference. You take your c
hances on the street. On campus? They gonna be tons of police. You just watch.”
Normally Chloe was wary of the cops, but now Mel knew why she’d changed her tune: reality, at the moment, was just too fucking scary.
She snuck a glance up at the sky. It was still blood-red and shot through with greens and blues, even though it was past midnight.
When they’d climbed up out of the Metro after walking through the unlit tunnel for half an hour, the sky had been the first clue that there wasn’t just an electrical glitch with the train. One woman had stepped out onto the platform and dropped straight to her knees, praying loudly in Spanish. An older white man in a business suit had spun and started slamming his briefcase into the crowd; he was trying to go back into the tunnels—back into the darkness. His screams set off a panic and the crowd went nuts. They’d gotten caught up in the rush of people clambering to get out of the station and then hot-footed it to Mel’s rental truck. There they had huddled and tried to calm down, tried to figure out what was going on; but Amy couldn’t get a signal on the radio or any of their cell phones. In the end, they’d decided to err on the side of caution and get back to campus.
It had taken hours to go just a few miles; most of the intersections were blocked with accidents or power lines sagging down to the street. They’d had to backtrack and find a way around again and again. That was hard enough to do normally, but now without stop lights and lights on the street signs, it was damn near impossible. The truck’s built-in GPS wasn’t even working.
In some places, pole transformers were on fire; in others, fires had started where the electrical lines went into the buildings and homes. Fire trucks were nowhere to be seen, but some people were coming together to try to put the fires out with garden hoses.
“I just don’t get this,” Leandra said, watching a group of guys walk past them on the sidewalk and checking to make sure the doors were locked. “I mean, I get the cell phones not working. They always get overloaded when the power goes out and everybody tries to make a call all at once. But why people acting so freaky?”
“Uh, duh? Maybe it’s got something to do with the sky looking like it’s bleeding?” Mel said.
“Maybe a tornado came through,” Steph said. “Maybe that’s why the sky’s so red. My mom always said the sky goes funny before a tornado comes through-”
“There ain’t been no damn tornado,” Chloe said. “You see any flattened buildings? And since when does a tornado make it almost daylight outside? Hurricanes don’t even do that.”
“She might be onto something though,” Amy said. “Sometimes people get mean when a hurricane goes through. Remember all those people on Twitter planning to loot once Hurricane Sandy hit?”
“They would’ve told us if a hurricane was coming,” Mel said. She was eying the opposite lane. The traffic over there had died off after the last intersection. She’d only seen one car go down that lane, hauling ass away from campus.
“Look. Look!” Amy was leaning forward, pointing. “I see lights! I think they’ve got power at the University!”
“That looks like flood lights,” Leandra said. “Too bright to be anything else.”
Mel moved up a car length and leaned over the steering wheel, trying to decipher what she was seeing. At the front of the line of backed-up cars, there were people milling around. There was a crowd off to the side, shouting. It looked like pure confusion up there, with someone at the front standing next to their car. It was probably another fender-bender; they’d seen plenty of those in all the backups over the past few hours. As she watched, the person standing next to the car stepped back and waved. The line of cars moved forward, and as the headlights from the next car fell on that man, Mel’s eyes flew wide.
“Leandra, did you bring your IDs?” She asked, pulling her purse off of the console and digging through it.
Leandra had done four years in the Army before coming to school, and she usually kept all of her old college IDs in her purse in case they needed to sneak someone into a bar.
“Yeah… why?”
Mel found her wallet and with hurried movements, pulled her latest college ID out. It still stank of fresh plastic; she’d just gotten it this afternoon. After considering for a moment, she pulled out her driver’s license and credit cards, too.
“Give me the one from last year,” Mel said. “Amy, stick these in your bra.”
Amy gave Mel a strange look, but took the small stack of cards without comment and started digging around in her shirt.
“What for?” Leandra asked. “You’re twenty-one now-”
Mel spun around in her seat. “There are men in military camo up there checking cars. What happens to VIPs in an emergency drill?”
“Oh, shit,” Leandra said. “Yeah, hold on… here.” She handed the ID forward.
“But won’t they notice if you’ve both got the same name?” Amy watched as Mel slid Leandra’s ID into her wallet.
“No,” Leandra said. “They’ll have one soldier on each side of the truck checking IDs. They won’t notice unless they compare notes.” She slid to the far right side of the seat. “Where’s the rental papers? They’ll want those.”
“They’re in here,” Mel said, popping open the console. She looked them over. “Shit. My name’s on them.”
“Gimme,” Leandra said, reaching around Stephanie’s seat. When Mel handed them back, Leandra reached up and turned the interior light to the Off position. She pointed to the roof light at the front, and Mel turned that one off also.
“Y’all are seriously freaking me out,” Chloe said.
“Just watch the people in the car behind us and tell me if they notice anything,” Leandra said. “Steph, open up your door just a crack.”
“What? Why?” Stephanie asked, but she opened her door the slightest bit.
“Try to drop these under the truck,” Leandra said, handing Steph the rental papers. “Move slow—they’ll notice if you’re bobbing up and down. Good, good. Like that.”
Stephanie scooted down in her seat, shoving the papers out of the bottom of the door. She kept going until her whole hand was out, and with a flick of her wrist she tossed the papers under the truck.
“I think I got it,” she said. “I think they’re under the truck.” She shut the door.
“Guy behind us didn’t see it,” Chloe said. “He’s got his cellphone stuck out the window. I think he’s trying to call somebody.”
The line moved forward again, drawing Mel’s attention from the car behind her in the side mirror. She eased the truck forward.
“Somebody give me some cash,” Amy said. “It’ll look funny if there’s nothing in her wallet but an ID.”
Chloe’s hand appeared over the console with a crumpled-up wad of money, and Amy busied herself straightening it out and tucking it into Mel’s wallet.
“Can someone tell me why we’re doing all this?” Stephanie asked. “If they catch us, how much trouble are we gonna be in? I can’t get thrown out of school-”
“If the military is here, that means some serious shit has gone down,” Leandra said. “Mel’s mom is the Speaker of the House, making Mel a VIP. Standard procedure during emergencies is to isolate and secure VIPs until the threat is over. Maybe even move them somewhere safer, like a bunker.”
Mel shook her head as she pulled the truck forward again. There was only one car ahead of them now. “My parents are on vacation in Europe. The only other family I’ve got is right here on this campus. If I go anywhere, it’s wherever Ripley’s going. Ain’t nobody putting me in a cage.”
“And this is the only ID you’ve got on you?”
“When the machine broke this afternoon, they told me I’d have to go back tomorrow morning and bring all of my paperwork and ID again, so I just left everything on my clipboard with my registration papers. I didn’t even think about it when we decided to get something to eat; I just grabbed my purse and went.”
The soldier eyed Mel suspiciously. On the passenger side, anothe
r soldier had already grilled Amy and moved on to Stephanie. Turning to Chloe, whose window was down by order, he jerked a thumb at Mel.
“You there. What’s your friend’s name?”
Chloe blinked. “Her? Leandra Jones.”
“What dorm is she in?”
“Cumberland.”
The soldier scanned Leandra’s ID again with his flashlight and huffed, making a notation on his clipboard where he’d already written down the truck’s license plate and description.
“Fine. Let me see your ID.”
Mel twisted her hands in her skirt as the man questioned Chloe. A soldier with a huge german shepherd had walked all around the truck, followed by another with a mirror on a pole. A third soldier was currently digging through their shopping bags in the back. This was the kind of treatment she’d had the last time her mother had taken her onto a naval base to tour the Navy’s latest submarine. What the hell were they doing scanning for bombs at the entrance to campus? Was the soldier in the back going to look at the receipts? She’d paid for everything with a credit card, and her name was printed on each receipt. She’d completely forgotten about that until she’d been ordered to unlock the back door.
The soldier on the right thumped the truck twice. “I’m good over here. They check out.”
“Same here,” called the soldier in the back. “Nothing here but clothes and makeup.” He stepped back and hit the button to shut the rear door.
“Alright Ms. Jones, I’ll buy your story about the ID because your friend here verifies your details. I’m going to need you to follow those cones and park this vehicle in the visitor parking over there. Be sure to lock it and take the keys with you.” He pointed, and Mel could see a handful of parked cars with students taking their belongings out. More soldiers stood nearby, watching carefully.
“What? Why? We’ll have to walk all the way across campus at night-” Chloe started.
“There’s power lines sagging down to the ground all over the campus roads. It’s a safety risk, and this entire campus belongs to the state of Maryland. I’m here to keep people from getting hurt, and keep Maryland from getting sued. Governor’s orders. If you don’t like it, you’re free to turn around and head back into the city.”