Island Refuge EMP Box Set | Books 1-3

by Hamilton, Grace

  “It’s as bad as I said,” Garret muttered, plopping himself down on a chair in the corner and propping his feet on a decorative barrel. “We are one-hundred percent screwed.”

  “You’re not helping,” Malin replied. “I have to get to Vegas. There’s no telling what Claire is going through there. Our wedding is supposed to be in two days, and now she’s stuck at the Fremont Hotel with her bridesmaids. Can you imagine how crazy things are in Las Vegas right now? Especially on Fremont Street. All of those tourists must be going nuts. She’s not safe, dude. Plus, she has no idea what’s happening to me. I’m sure she’s worried sick.”

  “Well, you’d better send up smoke signals or something to let her know you’re fine,” Garret replied. “There’s no easy way off this island, and, believe me, I want to get out of here as much as anyone.”

  “Guys, don’t start fighting again,” Selene said, carrying her dog into the far corner. “It stresses out Sniffy.”

  “Who’s Sniffy?” Garret said with a laugh.

  Selene didn’t answer, but instead hugged her dog tightly and gazed out a window.

  “I’m supposed to get married,” Malin said, directing the comment at Selene. “I think you can understand why I might be a bit on edge.”

  To this, Selene shrugged. She didn’t bother looking at him, but she muttered, almost inaudibly, “Oh, marriage isn’t so great anyway.”

  “Folks, let’s not give up,” Elna’s father said. He attempted what was almost certainly meant to sound like a friendly chuckle. It came across as forced. “Things are not so bad. Look, there’s a lot of good food in the freezer. Since it’ll spoil, why don’t we go ahead and prepare a nice big lunch? We’ll have steak and mashed potatoes, a pasta salad, some chicken, steamed vegetables, all sorts of delicious things.”

  “One nice meal,” Garret muttered, “before we start scrounging for scraps like rodents.”

  Elna’s mood was definitely drifting toward the Garret end of the spectrum. How could Pop pretend like everything was okay? Didn’t he understand that within days, if they didn’t find some drastic solution, they would be in real danger here on the island? Wine alone wouldn’t keep them alive (though it would ease their long, painful demise), and it was weeks past the August harvest time. The grapes wouldn’t be edible for a while.

  As her father invited the guests to the kitchen to help with lunch, Elna rose and turned to her father. He was beaming from beside the stacks of cans. Elna waited until the guests had filed out of the room before approaching him.

  “Pop, you shouldn’t give them false hope,” she said softly.

  “If I don’t try to keep things positive, they’ll be at each other’s throats in no time,” he replied, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Even with this small group, if everyone starts to panic, we’ll have instant chaos.”

  He had a point. A positive attitude, even if forced, would keep them levelheaded and contribute to clear thinking. She was letting Garret and Malin get to her.

  “Okay, I get it,” she said. “No sense worrying too far ahead. One problem at a time.”

  “There you go,” her father said, reaching across the bar to pat her on the shoulder. “That’s the way. Now, let’s eat, and let’s try not to think about the future for a little while.”

  It took a little over an hour, and most of the guests helping, to prepare the rather ridiculous meal. In the end, they produced an impressive spread of steak, mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables, baked chicken, shrimp cocktail, pasta salad, bread, cheese, fruit, and plenty of wine. Elna was hungry, having skipped breakfast, but the stress of trying to maintain a positive attitude made it a little hard to eat. She forced herself to down as much as she could. Gazing around the table, it felt a little bit like the Last Supper. Will we ever eat a real meal like this again?

  Norman seemed fondest of the mashed potatoes, and he’d heaped them on his plate to overflowing. Joe and Rita sat beside him, the elderly couple primly eating shrimp cocktail and green beans. Malin had a voracious appetite and had already wolfed down two steaks, two chicken breasts, and plenty of shrimp over the course of an hour, all while periodically complaining about missing his wedding. His best man, on the other hand, seemed to mostly have an appetite for red wine, and he kept a bottle at hand throughout the meal.

  “Help yourselves to seconds and thirds, folks,” Elna’s father said, a bit of mashed potato hanging off the corner of his mustache. “Eat as much as you can. It won’t keep.” Elna was impressed at how gregarious he managed to sound. Years of trying to keep guests happy had clearly taught him how to fake it very well.

  Selene was trying to get a reluctant Sniffy to eat a shrimp, but for some reason, the dog wouldn’t take it. The usual chitchat one might expect at a big meal was absent, so the room was full of chewing and chomping and the clanking of silverware against plates. Finally, Norman broke the tension.

  “I don’t remember if I told you guys, but I own a gift shop in Santa Cruz,” he said. “You’ll never guess the name. It’s called Norman’s. That’s right. I named it after myself.” He had a pleasant voice, deep and almost musical. Elna found that it made her sleepy.

  “A fellow business owner,” Pop said. “Very nice.”

  “Is it on the wharf?” Malin asked. “My favorite seafood place is about halfway down the Santa Cruz Wharf.”

  “No, not that lucky.” Norman scooped up another big heap of mashed potatoes and gravy and proceeded to eat it while continuing to speak. “A few blocks north. It was always my dream to run my own place. I had to work hard for other people a long time before I could get the loan. We got all kinds of seashells and snow globes, funny coffee mugs and stuff for your home. We got t-shirts and bumper stickers and locally crafted art.”

  “Sounds nice,” Selene said. “My sort of place.”

  “The first few years were hard,” he said. “So hard. But I hung in there, and eventually the tourists figured out where we were. When the motel came in next door, it really helped. Lately, we’ve been doing so good that I decided to take a vacation. First vacation in five years.” He sipped from his glass of wine. “That’s why I’m here instead of looking after the store.”

  “Surely, no one would loot a gift shop,” Rita Dulles said, a sharp edge to her voice as if the very idea offended her deepest sensibilities. “It’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”

  “I’d like to think you’re right,” Norman said, and then, a wistful look on his face, he added, “I had it looking so nice in there. I wish I could show you. There’s a lot of pictures on my phone, but…you know…”

  “Maybe we’ll see it someday,” Malin said. “Save a snow globe for me. Claire loves those things.”

  “I will. What about the rest of you? What did you do on the mainland? What are you trying to get back to?”

  His questions hung in the air for a few seconds as guests glanced at each other.

  Malin washed down whatever he was eating with a large gulp of wine before he spoke up. “I’m a business owner too. I run a company that rents outdoor equipment, like mountain bikes, kayaks, GoPro cameras, scuba gear. Wasn’t my original plan. I went to college to learn business so I could become an entrepreneur. Which I am, but I thought I’d launch some cutting-edge startup—riding the wave of innovation. As it turns out, you have to have an innovative idea to be on the cutting edge, so there you go. Instead, I used a small-business loan to start Weber Outdoors. It’s profitable, if not entirely exciting.”

  “That sounds nice, though,” Norman said.

  Malin only shrugged at this seeming uncomfortable with the praise. Elna wasn’t entirely surprised at his profession, though she’d half expected him to say he was a professional surfer. He certainly had the look.

  “Who else?” Norman said.

  After a few more seconds of awkward silence, Selene cleared her throat. “I’m an alternative medicine specialist. Naturopathy, mostly.” She gave people at the table a hard stare, lingering on Elna.


  She expects me to mock her, Elna thought. Let’s surprise her with a compliment.

  “Naturopathy,” Elna replied. “That’s about treating disease through health and diet, right? I’ve heard about it. Might be more important than ever in a world with no electricity.”

  “Yes, and also herbal medicine,” Selene continued, dropping her gaze. “Plus…I read people’s fortunes. That earns the most money by far, but it’s not what I really care about. Turns out, I’m pretty good at it. People like what I have to say.”

  She didn’t bother looking up this time, and Elna didn’t bother trying to give her a positive response.

  No, can’t go with you there, girl, Elna thought.

  “Anyway, I haven’t done much of that in a while,” Selene said. “Haven’t done much work at all. Mostly, it’s just me and my dog.”

  “That’s real nice,” Norman said. “Anyone else?”

  In the quiet that followed this time, it became clear that no one else was willing to participate. Garret was too fixed on his bottle of wine, and the Dulleses had mostly eaten in silence. Finally, Pop cleared his throat and said, “I think you know what my daughter and I do. Our name is on the sign as you drive in.”

  “Hard to miss,” Norman said.

  By the time most people had eaten their fill, Garret was swaying in his seat, lips stained red from wine. He spilled some on his shirt, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Finally, muttering a string of cuss words for no apparent reason, he tipped forward, and his cheek thudded against the tabletop.

  “I guess he’s done,” Elna’s father said.

  “Good,” Malin said sourly. “Someone want to help me carry him to his room?”

  At a glance from her father, Elna sighed and rose from the table.

  3

  The reality of their situation began to settle in sometime in the afternoon. Elna was helping arrange their food supplies in the tasting room as her father rooted through drawers looking for anything useful to add to the stockpile. Selene was sitting in the corner, quietly staring out a window. Other guests came and went, while Garret slept off his lunchtime indulgence.

  Elna considered their meager supplies. Really, it wasn’t much. They had enough canned food to last a few days at most. And then what? It wasn’t a big island. What if Garret was right? What if the damage was permanent and the power wasn’t coming back on ever? Her father’s optimism was beginning to seem foolish. Still, Elna’s own anxiety had given way to determination. They weren’t going to roll over and die, not if she had anything to do with it.

  “Pop, what about the other buildings on the island that haven’t been searched?” she asked. “There’s that big shed down by the causeway. There’s the lighthouse.”

  Her father had just found another small radio in a drawer in the storage closet behind the bar. He brought it out and set it on the counter. Then he set an unopened pack of C batteries beside it.

  “I suppose we should head out there,” he said, tearing open the battery pack. “We should probably scour the whole island. I just…” He shook his head. As he spoke, he put the unused batteries into the radio. “Elna, we’re a small operation here. A boutique winery. Even when we have a full complement of seasonal workers, there are never more than nine on staff. Remember when the Diocese of Santa Rosa wanted us to provide communion wine, and we had to turn them down? We don’t have that much.”

  “All the more reason to search everywhere on the island,” she said.

  He closed the battery compartment and flicked the on switch. The radio didn’t respond. With an angry grunt, he tossed the radio back into the closet. It hit the ground, bounced loudly, and broke against the far wall. A startled Selene came out of her seat, and Sniffy gave a loud bark.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Elna’s father said. “I dropped it.”

  “Pop, we can be optimistic and still prepare for the worst,” Elna said. “Anyway, solving problems and stockpiling gear isn’t pessimism.”

  “Right, right.” He sniffed, scratched at his mustache, and said, “Okay, fine, let’s round up whoever wants to help and see what we can find. Just be careful how you talk about this to the guests. Things are already tense.”

  “Your biggest source of tension is currently asleep,” she reminded him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Good. Let’s see if any of the guests want to come with us. Might help to give them something to do.”

  Malin, Selene, and Norman agreed to come with them. The Dulleses preferred to relax on the veranda, sipping wine and peering out over the island to the distant water. If not for the pensive expressions on their faces, Elna might have thought they were enjoying the warm afternoon breeze.

  The island in total was roughly 2.25 square miles with a small peak rising in the center to about 700 feet. The vineyard sat to the south of the peak in an area chopped out of the native vegetation. There were two primary buildings: the guesthouse and the winery. Seasonal workers stayed in a set of rooms at the back of the winery. The only maintained road wound down the eastward slope toward the causeway, but Elna knew that there were older roads and neglected places on the island that her family rarely, if ever, used. One of those was a large aluminum storage building that sat in a small field in sight of the causeway.

  As they started down the road, she pointed out the roof of the storage building, which was just visible over some wild growth below.

  “That’s where we’re headed first,” she said.

  Selene was walking her little dog, and Sniffy lived up to his name. In fact, he was so determined to sniff everything and root around that Selene soon began to fall behind, forcing them to stop periodically and wait for her.

  “This place looked so quaint and nice when I first drove in,” Malin said. “Now, it’s starting to feel a little like that old show Survivor. I’m ready to be voted off the island and get back to the woman who is supposed to become my wife, like, tomorrow.” His perfectly gelled hair had come entirely undone, cracking apart into a hundred shiny spikes, and his suit jacket was long past wrinkled as he pushed at the sleeves in agitation.

  “You can always try swimming ashore,” Selene muttered. She said it so quietly that Elna barely heard it, and if Malin heard, he didn’t react.

  When they reached the storage shed, Elna’s father pulled out his impressive key ring and started hunting for the right key to unlock the old Master Lock. It took a while, and when he opened the door the hinges shrieked from neglect.

  “Just don’t have much reason to go in here these days,” he said.

  Elna followed him into the dim, musty interior, where dusty piles of equipment sat on shelves and tables against the walls. Selene hung back by the door with Sniffy while the others began to root around in the shed.

  The first potentially useful thing Elna found was some old, deep-sea fishing gear in the near corner: two sturdy rods and reels, a couple of gaffs, extra fishing line, a box of lures, and a tackle box. She slid it all close to the door.

  “We can make use of this,” she said. “Probably easier to leave it here for now since we’re closer to the shoreline, but it’s good to know it’s here.”

  Malin glanced at the gear. “Fishing. Nice,” he said, nodding at Elna, as if it were the only relevant thing he could think to say. Then he went back to rooting around on the shelves.

  Elna made eye contact with Selene, and the woman shrugged as if to say, I don’t get him either.

  Norman was fiddling with a metal cabinet door in the corner, pulling at it and muttering curses. The door finally came open, and he almost lost his balance, catching himself against the edge of a nearby table.

  “Well, look what we have here,” he said, pulling some packaged batteries out and setting them on the table. There were all manner of batteries—AA, AAA, C, D, 9-volt—still in their packaging. “You figure these are any good?”

  “They’ve been sitting there a few years,” Elna’s father said. “I doubt it. What’s the shelf life of alkaline batteries?”
>
  “Five to ten years,” Elna replied, pulling the factoid out of the jumble of eccentric data in her brain. “Assuming they didn’t get fried like everything else.”

  Norman ripped one of the 9-volt batteries out of its package and touched the contacts to the tip of his tongue. He winced. “There’s still juice in this one,” he said. “Some of these are good.”

  “How is that possible?” Malin asked.

  Elna considered the question. “Maybe the metal cabinet acted like a Faraday cage and protected them from the surge.”

  “Too bad we didn’t have a Faraday cage around the whole darn island,” Malin said.

  “And look at this,” Norman said, reaching back into the cabinet. He pulled out a small transistor radio and set it on the table. “Jackpot, folks. Maybe it got protected too.”

  “Good job, Norman,” Elna’s father said. “Maybe we’ll get a little news from the mainland, assuming any stations are able to broadcast.”

  “We might not like what we hear,” Malin warned.

  Elna was inclined to agree with him, though she wanted to hear it all. Better to know the full truth so they could deal with reality.

  When they left the storage shed, they walked down to the causeway, gazing across the gap at the seemingly endless waves. The narrow causeway disappeared into the blue haze, though Elna thought she could make out the first drawbridge in the distance. It was a one-sided bascule bridge with the motor located on the island side, as indicated by the small service building nearby.

  “So we can’t get across?” Malin asked.

  “It’s roughly two miles to the nearest drawbridge,” Elna’s father said. “Then another two miles to the next one and two to the one after that.”

  “How big is the gap when they’re up?” Malin asked.

  “What do you think, Elna?” her father asked.

  She shrugged. “I’d guess maybe two-hundred feet, but it’s a thirty-foot drop into the bay, and the water is rough.”