by E S Richards
Riley snorted, looking at her brother as if to ask if he was genuinely being serious with his answer. “It’s Houston, Chase,” she replied. “We’re going to find people no matter which way we come in.”
“I know,” Chase sighed, sensing a note of annoyance in his sister’s tone. “It’s just in case, okay? We need to be careful here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Riley nodded. “Do you know where we’re heading for supplies? Is there a store that’s on this way in at least?”
“I don’t know,” Chase answered honestly. In truth, his mind was more focused on the other aspects of their arrival in Houston rather than what they needed to patch up the roof of the farmhouse. He didn’t think Riley was giving the situation the attention it deserved and that irritated him slightly. How could he agree to trust her if she didn’t understand the gravity of what they were doing?
Houston looked dark and mysterious in the distance, the high-rise buildings towering over the road as Chase drove toward them. The first thing he noticed was a large car crash on the interstate that ran above the one he drove in on, the road having broken apart on the side and crumbled to the ground below. One car still hung over the edge, its rear wheels dangling over nothingness. Chase wondered what it must’ve been like to be inside that vehicle, certain death just inches away before everything froze.
The city itself was shrouded in a dark cloud, much like most of the horizon had been throughout his drive. A few additional plumes of smoke wove their way up into the sky from fires burning throughout the city, but other than that the place looked silent. Empty. Chase was certain there were still thousands of people within its walls though, hidden away as the dark cloud of ash threatened to consume them if they left their houses. It ate away at everything like venomous bacteria, chewing through whatever lay in its path and consuming it all. Nothing was safe from the cloud. Entering it feeling like entering a tomb.
“Look,” Chase continued, preparing himself to rattle off a speech to his younger sibling about how dangerous what they were about to do was and how careful they needed to be. His mouth was open and the speech on the tip of his tongue, when in the distance he saw a single figure step out into the middle of the road, waving their hands in the air.
“Chase…” Riley whispered, noticing the figure as well.
“I know,” Chase nodded, slowing the truck. It was the first person they had seen since leaving the farmhouse. The first person outside of their immediate family that they knew for certain was alive. The figure remained stationary in the road, waving both arms above their head signaling to the moving vehicle.
“What do we do?” Riley asked, her voice wavering slightly. “Do we stop?”
“I don’t know,” Chase replied as he continued driving, albeit much slower than before. “Make sure your door is locked,” he prompted as he checked his own. “Follow my lead.”
Chapter 5
Mia sat quietly in the passenger seat of the Mazda CX-5, Patrick driving confidently to her left. In the back sat Allie, Miles, and Billy, accompanied finally by Deb’s dog, Corker. The three children were all making a huge fuss over Corker, the dog walking across each of their knees and making sure he got as much attention as possible. Mia was glad for it. The noise from the children meant it was loud enough for her and Patrick to get away with not talking. Neither of them wanted to. Not after what they had just done.
The task that she and Patrick had endured alone had been hideous. The worst thing that Mia had done since she watched Yellowstone erupt. They’d worked in silence, clearing the dead bodies from the mangled cars so that they could move them to one side and gain access to the highway. It was a horrible job, but someone had to do it.
Mia had moved with tears streaming down her face as she untangled a middle-aged woman from the steering wheel of one of the cars. Her limbs were bent and broken in directions that shouldn’t have been possible, bones protruding out of the skin in a truly stomach-turning fashion. That wasn’t even the worst of it. In the passenger seat, across from who Mia assumed was the mother, sat a young girl. No more than seven or eight years old.
In reality, a girl too young and too small to be sitting in the front seat of a car. Her body had been thrown forward when the car stopped, the girl catapulted forward in her seat so quickly that the seatbelt mechanism couldn’t even react and save her. There was nothing more than a small welt on her head from where it had hit the dashboard. A mark that looked so insignificant a teacher wouldn’t have even turned their head on the playground. Yet, that was all it took. The girl was frozen in time. Her eyes wide open and her face morphed into a look of terror that had been present the very moment she died. Mia hoped that it had been quick. Instant. One slam into the dashboard and the young girl was dead. That’s what she told herself anyway.
Even after all of that, Mia hadn’t asked Patrick what he saw in the car that he was forced to move. She knew he would be thinking about it and with the vision of the mother and girl in her own head, Mia didn’t want to know what horrors he had seen. That would only add to her pain. Nor did she want to talk about it. The two of them sat in silence as he drove, letting their thoughts get the better of them until neither one of them could take it any longer.
“Let’s get some air in here, shall we?” Patrick broke the silence, pressing his finger down on the automatic window button to his left. “It’s getting a bit stuffy in here.”
It wasn’t getting stuffy. In fact, the air conditioning inside the car was still in excellent working order, keeping the five of them—plus Corker—in the most comfortable condition they’d been in since everything began. Mia understood nonetheless. As her window opened beside her, she found herself leaning into the breeze. The wind rushed past and made her eyes water from the dust and grim in it, but it was still a breath of fresh air. It cleared out her head somewhat, blowing out the thoughts and images of the dead bodies she had just moved and replacing them with a blank canvas. An opportunity for more, better memories to be made.
“That’s nice,” she smiled, though Mia was forced to pick up her scarf from the floor and hold it over her mouth to stop herself from breathing in the dirty air. “Refreshing somehow.”
Patrick looked over at her and nodded, understanding what Mia was saying. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I’ll just leave them down for a minute or two. You kids all right back there?”
“Cover your mouths, guys,” Mia warned as she turned in her seat to look at the three children, each of them having grown quiet since she and Patrick began to talk. “We’ll put the windows up in a second. Just letting some air through here.”
“It looks so dark outside,” Allie commented. “What time is it?”
Looking at the dash of the car, both Mia and Patrick could see that it was only a little after two in the afternoon. The sun should be at its highest point in the sky and yet you wouldn’t even be able to tell it was daytime if you didn’t know. They were all incredibly lucky to have found the vehicles in such good working order—the headlights were on to try and cut through the darkness that the cloud created and the engine was purring like nothing at all had happened.
“Just after lunch, Allie,” Patrick told his daughter. “Nearly time for Jeopardy! on a Sunday afternoon.”
Mia smiled at the reference, surmising that it was clearly something Patrick had done with his family every weekend. She missed those sorts of things. The little traditions and habits that were formed among loved ones, often things that didn’t really have any significance to people outside of the group but that could become incredibly important to those within it.
It wasn’t until after Brogan and Lauren died that Mia realized how important those things had been to her. She missed the monthly barbeques that they hosted, inviting people from their work, the neighbors, family, and more for a big cookout and a cold beer or two. More than that, she missed the smaller things like what Patrick was referring to. She missed how Lauren would text her any time she saw a bottle of Jimmy Red Roo—their favorite A
ustralian red wine—in a store, or how Brogan would shout out the word “horse” whenever they passed one in the car. It was something they’d started doing as children, a tradition he’d carried on well into adulthood.
Now whenever Mia passed by a horse or saw any bottle of red wine, she always thought of the two of them. She missed them both greatly, and the moments they had shared together. Both were taken far too young and left behind far too much. But at least they didn’t have to experience the world she was living in now. At least they had gotten out before everything came crumbling down around them. Now Mia was alone—without her brother and who had become one of her closest friends. She was alone and she had to make it home to save their children; Chase and Riley had become her own and she would stop at nothing to see them again.
“Whereabouts in Seattle do you live?” Mia asked Patrick as he finally closed the windows, the children quickly abandoning their scarves and returning to quiet conversation. “What’s it like?”
Patrick looked over at Mia and then back over his shoulder at Allie, smiling to himself as he watched his daughter playing with the dog. “We’re just before Seattle actually,” he explained. “On Mercer Island. Do you know it?”
Mia shook her head. “No,” she answered, “I’ve actually never been to Washington State before. This is a new one for me.”
“Well, I wish it were on better terms,” Patrick sighed. “I’m nervous about what’s happened to the city. Do you think it’ll be okay?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure,” Mia lowered her voice, trying to avoid the children overhearing what they were talking about. Thankfully, both Allie and Miles were perfectly preoccupied with Corker, while Billy stared wistfully out of the window. Mia hoped the young boy was okay. She guessed he must be thinking of his mother and what had happened to her. If her predications about what was going to happen in that small village turned out to be right, Billy would never see the woman again.
“I think the bigger cities will be worse off,” Mia continued quietly. “There’s equal risk of water contamination anywhere to be perfectly honest, and the air is going to be dangerous for miles. I don’t think we’ll escape that while on the West Coast.”
“Mm-hmm,” Patrick pursed his lips, hoping Mia was going to interject with a “but” somewhere and sensing quite the opposite.
“On top of that,” Mia continued, making Patrick realize his worst fears. “There’s the added pressure of the body count. The people. The more people that are around, the more likely it is that human error can play a part in what’s happening, and more often than not, make everything worse. I know you don’t want to hear it, but if you want my recommendation: I wouldn’t go running back into the middle of Seattle.”
Patrick exhaled a deep breath of air. He didn’t know why he’d asked; that was exactly the answer he’d expected from Mia. To be perfectly honest, it was the thought that had been running through his head when he managed to clear all the other horrible thoughts and emotions from it. Was going home really the right choice? For all the negatives and reasons he could find against it, there was one overwhelming reason that meant he wasn’t going to end up anywhere else. It was his home. No matter how risky it was going to be going back into the city, he didn’t know where else he and Allie would end up. There wasn’t another option: he wanted to take his only daughter home.
“I know you’re going to anyway,” Mia continued, seeing the look of fear and worry on Patrick’s face and understanding what was going through his mind. “And I don’t blame you, really. In times like these we can only make the decisions that we deem right for ourselves. You can’t let anyone else rule your life for you.”
“Thanks, Mia,” Patrick smiled after a moment, taking his eyes off the road for a second to look over at her. “I mean it. For everything.”
Mia waved a hand in Patrick’s general direction, dismissing him and his words. She hated being thanked, hated being seen as a martyr just because she’d done what she thought was right and what she believed in. “Don’t,” she spoke up. “I mean what I say—I’ve only done things which I feel have been right for myself. That’s how we get by in this world. If I’ve helped save a few people along the way then so be it, but I’ve mostly had selfish intentions.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Patrick chuckled. “Don’t put yourself down so much, Mia. It’s not a sin to let people be grateful to you.”
“Never something I’ve been very good at though,” Mia mumbled, not intending for Patrick to hear her but earning another small chuckle from the man anyway.
“I can believe that,” he smiled. “Maybe you’ll get better though. Maybe I can even teach you a thing or two about that before our time together is up.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Mia smiled back, feeling comfortable in Patrick’s presence like she always did. He was a good man. He loved his family just as much as she did and would do anything for them. To Mia, that was all that someone needed to do to be in her good graces; she would admire Patrick until the day she said goodbye and after that she would think of the man fondly.
The two adults continued to talk pleasantly for several more miles, Route 90 carrying them farther away from Helena Regional Airport and toward the state line of Washington. From the passenger seat, Mia was granted the opportunity to take in their surroundings, marveling at how far the destruction from Yellowstone had already spread.
The road spanned out for miles ahead of them, the asphalt relatively unfazed by the fall of ash and the streams of lava that would’ve flowed not far from where they drove. Conversely, on either side of the highway the fields were destroyed, their once-green expanse now a dark color, the life drained from the fields like water from a bathtub. Everything was dead. The ash had killed everything in its path and Mia knew that was only the beginning. No crops would be able to grow on the fields for many years to come, the soil itself poisoned by the toxic fragments that had been carried on the wind and dumped there. Pretty soon the country would realize that they had no way to grow food anymore and mass panic would set in. Mia could only hope she was back with her family before that happened. Hoping that her parents had used their common sense and started preparing for such a disaster as soon as the first flecks of ash fell from the sky.
A few hours later, it finally came time for Mia to attempt to drive through the horrors herself, swapping seats with Patrick so she could take a turn behind the wheel. It was only after the switch over—when they’d also had a quick meal and caught up with how the other two cars were doing—that she noticed Billy looking a little off-color in her rearview mirror.
His skin seemed somewhat paler than that of both Allie and Miles and it shone in the dim lighting like there was a layer of sweat present on it. She thought back to the break they’d all just taken and realized she hadn’t actually seen the young boy eat any food. Had she just missed it, or was there a reason Billy had chosen not to eat? Curious, Mia kept a close eye on him as she drove, deliberating whether to say something to Patrick about it. After another hour, when both Allie and Miles had fallen asleep, she finally broached the topic.
“Are you feeling okay, Billy?” She spoke out loud, hoping her voice would carry backwards as she was unable to take her eyes off of the road at that current time due to some abandoned cars clogging the highway. “Do you want to rest your eyes too?”
“I’m okay,” Billy replied in a quiet voice, keeping his head down and avoiding looking forward at either Mia or Patrick. Mia hoped Patrick’s attention would be drawn to the young boy now as well, able to question him while she focused on driving.
“You look a little pale,” Patrick commented as he turned in the passenger seat to look at Billy. “Do you have some water back there?” Billy shook his head, so he was rewarded with Patrick passing him a bottle of water from his footwell. It was clean—picked up from the farmhouse they had stayed in with the seal unbroken. “Here you go,” Patrick offered, “drink up.”
Mia watched in the rearview mirror closel
y as Billy lifted the water to his mouth, pouring a few, small sips over his lips. She saw his face grimace slightly as he swallowed, the motion appearing to cause him some pain. As a result, Mia swallowed too. This didn’t look good. Glancing over at Patrick she could see that the father had witnessed the same thing and both of them shared a knowing expression.
“Keep hold of that if you want,” Patrick smiled at Billy, turning back in his seat so he was facing forward. “And try and get some rest if you can. There’s still a long way to go.”
Chapter 6
“I’ve got a proposal for you, my friend.” Vic smiled down at Blake, handing him a mug of coffee he’d just brewed in the shop.
“Yeah?” Blake questioned while rubbing his eyes. He was tired. Neither of them had slept well, the sounds of the city penetrating the walls of their hideaway throughout the night and keeping them awake. He swung his legs over the side of the camp bed where he’d slept and accepted the mug of coffee. At least it was warm. Hopefully that would force some life back into his bones. “What’s that?”
“Well,” Vic started, taking a seat on his own camp bed, which was set up opposite Blake’s. “I’m not going to pretend that neither of us heard what was happening last night. Or that we didn’t hear it the night before. We’re safe down here—we can’t deny that—but I’m also beginning to think that it’s leaving us a bit cut off from the city. We have no idea what’s going on out there and I don’t really like that.”
Blake nodded. He had spent two full days locked inside the store with Vic now. They had both briefly gone outside, only to deal with an altercation that Blake would rather forget. All in all, living in there wasn’t exactly how he had anticipated it. They had everything they needed to survive, but it was just the two of them and there was little else to do aside from sorting through supplies and sharing stories.