Salt of Gomorrah

by Alex Mersey

  “That would have been your hint to turn back.”

  “There was an armory on Pleasant Valley Way I had my heart set on, but the Silvers got to it first.” His gaze narrowed into Sean. “You’re going looking for antibiotics?”

  Sean nodded. “And maybe a doctor, if what you said about Livingston is still true.”

  “I might have something better.” Clint whipped a travel map from his back jean pocket, already folded open on the square he wanted.

  Sean shifted around to look right side up while Clint pointed out their current position, the golf club that hung off the tip of South Mountain Reservation. The two locations circled in blue ink drew his eye. The armory on Pleasant Valley Way and, a little further south, a large medical center.

  “You planned to hit up the medical center straight after the armory,” Sean muttered.

  Clint grinned as if he’d just received the highest compliment. “You’re looking at the new currency, right there. Weapons and drugs. And no need to gawk at me like that with your lofty principles, I ain’t planning on raiding the hospital. I’ve still got some soul left. We’ve set up base here to wait it out. It won’t be long before the Silvers blast the place to high heaven, then we’ll go excavating.”

  Great, a vulture with soul. Why was he surprised? Oh, yeah, he wasn’t. Clint struck him as exactly the type of man to use the apocalypse as his golden ticket to become a drug lord and build his empire on the ashes.

  “Hang on.” His eyes squared on Clint as the rest of the man’s words sank in. “What are you saying? The medical center is still there?”

  “Up and running from what we saw when we scouted out the joint yesterday,” Clint confirmed. “An hour’s walk if you keep up the pace. The roads ain’t much good for navigating, but head west for half an hour and then turn south. You can’t miss it.”

  As charming as Clint’s faith in him as a human compass was, Sean studied the map to imprint the route before returning to the others, armed with the green box and conflicted tidings.

  With the itch ointment applied and Alli’s wound redressed, he pulled Beth and Lynn aside in the dining room to pass on the news.

  Omitting Clint’s optimistic forecast of imminent doom, he did share some of his own reticence at diving into the belly of what he considered a prime Silvers target. “On the map, the place looks like a medical city, not just a center. We go in, get what we need, and don’t linger. Any place that’s built up or densely populated is a magnet for unwanted attention.”

  “Things can’t be as bad out there as Clint led us to believe,” Lynn said. “Not if the hospitals are still manned and operational.”

  Beth’s gaze sharpened on him. “What did Clint say about things out there?”

  “We’ll talk on the road,” Sean said warily.

  “No.” She stepped in front of him, arms folded, chin set high. “Tell me, how bad is it?”

  He sighed. “The power grid is down, probably state-wide. A lot of cities have been destroyed, Beth, razed to the ground like where we came from. Evacuated people roaming the countryside, displaced and desperate. He reckons the government’s gone silent and chaos is the new order. Cars are dead, all modern technology is fried. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “The infrastructure took a lot of damage from the alien attack?”

  “We’re calling them Silvers,” Lynn said. “Apparently that’s the official name.”

  “Do you know what an electromagnetic pulse is?” asked Sean.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” Beth’s nose wrinkled. “Something to do with solar flares, right?”

  Close enough. “We have to assume all communication is down, all forms of transport, anything that you’d plug in. But as Lynn said, it may not be quite as bad out there as the picture he painted.”

  Beth stood down. “It can’t be worse than what we left behind.”

  “There’s more.” Sean said, watching her carefully as he told her about the other motherships around the world, about London. “I’m sorry, Beth. He saw the broadcast before the lights went out.”

  Her pale skin white-washed. “I guess that makes sense,” she said in small voice, barely audible. “They didn’t come all this way from God knows where just to terrorize America. It was silly of me to think otherwise.”

  “You and me both,” Lynn said. “But we can’t give up hope.”

  “Alli and I were caught in the thick of it. If we could survive…” For just a moment, she reminded him of a stray waif, hair cropped down to nothing, cheeks sucked in, blue eyes widening into the shock. But then she seemed to pull herself together and he wondered if he’d imagined it. “The ship was over central London?”

  “The river,” Sean replied. “Westminster, Big Ben, that area.”

  “We live in Battersea, that’s south of the Thames,” Beth said. “My family would have had time to get away.”

  To where? Sean wanted to ask, but didn’t. If weapons and drugs were the new world currency, hope would be the blood that held humanity together. England was so tiny, however, a pinprick in the Silvers’ scope.

  He gave the girl a quizzical look. “You’re handling this better than I’d have thought.”

  “Do I have a choice?” Her expression hardened as she grabbed her backpack and upended it over the table.

  The contents spilled out, including pairs of flimsy flip flops and a hardcover notebook. Only the First Aid kit went back in, replenished from the green cross box.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Sean said. “I’ll make a knapsack from a t-shirt to carry what we need.”

  “It’s just rubbish,” she said dismissively, leading the way to the club shop without a backward glance.

  Ten minutes later, they were ready to say their goodbyes.

  Bisson handed Johnnie a three-pack of golf balls and ruffled the kid’s hair. “Don’t aim that killer swing at anyone…” He broke off with a chuckle. “Unless they have it coming.”

  Johnnie wrapped his arms around the man’s legs. “Why can’t you come with us?”

  “Sorry.” Lynn untangled her son, going down to explain quietly, “He would if he could, sweetie, but Bisson has to stay here. They’ve got important things to do.”

  Having divulged the wannabe drug lord’s master plan to her, Sean assumed she made it sound like grave-robbing was a noble profession for the kid’s benefit.

  Clint made one last bid to get rid of Vince’s boots. “It’s gonna be a scorcher today.” He looked down on Sean’s flip flops with scorn. “The sun will melt those right off your feet.”

  Sean declined, but he did shake the man’s hand. “Thanks for letting us take the extra food and water. And for not killing us,” he added dryly.

  The gruff laugh followed their hasty exit through the stinky kitchen.

  As Clint had predicted, even when they could faintly make out where the road should be, any markings were hidden beneath shallow puddles and the grey mud churned from last night’s storm.

  Since Johnnie was the only one with a wristwatch, a windup with a Star Wars face, he was appointed the official timekeeper.

  “Forty-five minutes, okay?” Sean said, making the adjustment for their slower pace. “Then we need to turn south.”

  The kid took his responsibility seriously, eyes crunched on the timepiece as he worked it out. “Five minutes before nine o’clock?”

  “Let’s make it a round nine.” Sean tipped to whisper, “The ladies can’t walk as fast as us.”

  “I heard that,” Lynn snorted. She overtook them at a march and nearly came undone as her flops flipped the wrong way in the sticky mud.

  With the sun rising at their backs, the shower flip flops discarded and bare feet squelching in the gooey remains of New Jersey, they set off in the general direction of civilization.

  - 19 -

  Beth

  Once they veered away from the thick foliage of the reservation to their left, the landscape rapidly went from the grey, sludgy swamp to wa
r-torn suburbia. Crumbled walls piled up against collapsed brownstones, a blown-out glass office building, tumbled vehicles and long driveways that led to rubble and ruins. The scenes reminded Beth of news clips from places like Aleppo and the Gaza Strip, minus the ravaged faces of people who’d given up any vestiges of hope.

  We can’t give up hope, Lynn had said, and Beth hadn’t.

  Mom. Dad. Nan. Aunty Jen. All her cousins. All her friends, Alli’s friends, everyone they knew and loved. They weren’t gone. They couldn’t be, because she couldn’t stay strong with that numbing grief that had threatened to crash and buckle her heart. She’d hardened herself to this new reality, but she hadn’t turned to stone and ice.

  She loved Alli fiercely and would do anything to keep her safe, not just alive, but safe from all the cruelties of this new world. She had to believe her family was safe on the other side of the Atlantic, that they’d found shelter, that they would survive, that one day they’d all be reunited.

  The deserted streets and silent ruins told her she wasn’t drunk on fairy juice and hadn’t gone soft in the head. The people here had had sufficient warning, they’d gotten far away. No doubt there were some bodies buried beneath the caved-in structures, but you couldn’t hide the mass of people who would have been slaughtered as they fled. Not here, where the devastation was nothing like the wasteland they’d crossed, where evidence of the dead hadn’t been cremated along with evidence of any life.

  “How about this,” Alli said to Johnnie. “First one to spot a whole window, still in its frame, wins.”

  Johnnie stopped swinging his club recklessly long enough to demand, “What do I win?”

  “Who says you’ll win?”

  “Clint gave me a treat for you kids,” Sean said. “That can be the prize.”

  Alli glowered at him. “I’m not a kid.”

  “Then you don’t want the treat?”

  “I never said that,” she grumbled.

  The competition was on. Alli drifted across the double lane, eyes peeled to the side, and Johnnie ran up ahead.

  “Not too far,” Lynn called.

  Sean walked faster, sending them a grin over his shoulder that carved a deep hollow into his square jaw. “I’ll keep him in sight.”

  With a smile that came from nowhere, Beth murmured, “He’s good with kids. Does he have any?”

  “Hmm, I don’t think so,” Lynn said. “He didn’t say anything about kids or a wife, and I did try to ask.”

  “I wonder if that makes it better or worse,” Beth thought out loud. “Not having anyone to worry about.”

  “Sean worries plenty.”

  “I know, I didn’t mean it that way.” She’d seen how protective he was of Lynn and Johnnie. And me and Alli. “I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t run into you guys.”

  “Well, for starters, your friends wouldn’t have stolen our boat,” Lynn said, always quick with that reminder. “We would have had a dry crossing, might even have landed the boat a little further south and never stumbled across the club house. Alli wouldn’t have an infected cut on her thigh and you wouldn’t have encountered the infamous Vince.”

  “He’s not infamous,” Beth stated coldly. “He’s nothing.”

  “The point I’m making is, sometimes you happen to other people, sometimes they happen to you. It’s not necessarily good or bad, it just is. You and Alli would have been fine on your own, you would have seen to that. But for the record…” She looked Beth in the eye, her smile genuine. “I don’t mind having you and your sister around.”

  “That’s very gracious of you,” Beth said, treading a fine line between sarcasm and sincerity.

  But Lynn just glanced to the crossroad where Sean and Johnnie had stopped and said, “Either they found a window or it’s time to turn south.”

  Neither, they realized as they closed the gap. The squeaking sound reached them first, then the sight of the woman pushing a shopping cart a couple of blocks down, pausing every other second to jerk it around or over the debris strewn road. The cart was packed high, either her belongings or looted goods, they weren’t close enough to discern. If she noticed them standing there, she gave no indication.

  “What’s going...?” Alli fell silent as she joined them and saw for herself.

  The woman shoved and pushed the cart through a valley banked by mountains of rubble and disappeared from sight. She wasn’t the only one, though. Movement stirred in the recesses of hollowed shells and ruins, animals or the breeze fluttering shreds of what was left, people scurrying like rats in the shadows or maybe just her mind playing tricks.

  “Let’s move,” Sean said, indicating for them to turn south, into the avenue at the crossing. “Johnnie, don’t run off.”

  As they walked, the ruins on their left gradually gave way to bush and trees with the curve of the concrete road. It was that curve that brought their group to a halt a short while later.

  Sean stood facing the jungle of dense green shrubbery and hardwoods. “If we want to continue direct south, we should cut through here.”

  “Seriously?” groaned Alli. “Some of us don’t have shoes, you know.”

  A redundant argument, considering they were all barefoot. Except for Johnnie, who’d won the sneaker lottery back at the Hudson.

  “In hindsight, I should have tried harder to bring our shoes with us across the river,” Sean said, accepting the unwarranted blame with a grimace. “I honestly thought we’d be able to scrounge some sort of footwear along the way.”

  “Are you sure that’s direct south?” asked Lynn.

  Beth squinted up to where the hazy ball of fire hung in the sky. Tracking by the position of the sun sounded straightforward in theory, but the wide blue skies were disorientating and it truly felt like the sun was all around them.

  “As sure as I can be,” Sean said. “I’ve been holding my bearings since we left the club house. Look, we can stick to the road for a little longer. Maybe it curves south again.”

  Beth shook her head. “We could end up walking miles in the wrong direction and get ourselves completely lost.”

  “It’s easier to get lost in the forest,” Lynn pointed out, “where Mr Tracker can’t see the sun.”

  “What I remember from the map,” Sean said, “there aren’t large swathes of forest here, just clumps of woodland. These trees can’t go too deep.”

  It was decided then, much to Alli’s disgust and vehement protests.

  Sean went in first, using his arm as a battering ram against the tangle of heavily shrouded branches that took them into a shaded terrain of hardwoods and less bush.

  The sharp twigs and stones hidden in the undergrowth wasn’t any worse than the ash-covered rubble they’d walked through yesterday, but Beth’s soles were still tender from that ordeal. If they ran into any strangers in these woods, she’d quite happily rob the shoes right off his feet. In a heartbeat.

  Karma wasted no time in punishing her for that thought. “Shit!” she cried as her calf caught on fire. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Sean swung around. Everyone else froze.

  Beth crouched, her hands fluttering protectively over her burning skin. It felt like an army of red ants on the march under there, but she couldn’t see a damn thing. “What is it? Shit!”

  “Stinging nettle,” Sean said, pointing at the clump of tall, innocuous looking weeds she’d brushed up against. “That’s gotta burn, but you’ll live.”

  “You’re kidding me?” She glared at him, seeing double from the haze of pain. “My skin’s on fire. Be careful,” she snapped when Alli rushed up to help. “Shit. What kind of stinging nettle do you guys grow here?”

  “The itch ointment,” Lynn instructed while grabbing Johnnie’s hand to steer him clear of the patch.

  “I told you this was a bad idea,” Alli said as she unzipped the pack on Beth’s back to retrieve the First Aid kit. “We’re not exactly equipped to go trekking through the wild.”

  “Alli, shut up and give t
hat to me.” Beth held her hand out for the tube. Thin red welts had erupted on her skin, which gave her brain something concrete to process and, for some weird reason, made the pain more bearable. The antibiotic ointment did the rest of the job, numbing her skin within a couple of seconds.

  “Okay,” Sean said when Beth was ready to proceed. “Let’s try not to do that again. Everyone, eyes sharp.”

  The trees were roughly twenty minutes deep, but that was with very slow going as they gingerly picked their way over the forest floor, tried to avoid scratches from overhanging greenery and tried not to do that again. Beth scowled into Sean’s back the whole way. That’s gotta burn, but you’ll live? She was tempted to shove him into a bush and see what he thought of that.

  Johnnie, bless his heart, finally drove the scowl from her face as they stepped out of the trees. He ran up to her and tugged at her hand, looking up with earnest big blue eyes. “I fell into a nettle bush at our Cub’s camp last summer. It really hurt.”

  She ruffled his head. “I’m sure you were a lot braver than me.”

  He tugged again to bring her lower so he could whisper, “I cried so hard, they had to call my mom to fetch me home and all the other boys laughed. They’re idiots.”

  “They certainly are,” she agreed with a glance at Sean. “Total idiots.”

  The single lane country road they’d stepped onto had no markings and the dense greenery pressing on both sides hid the sun’s position. Sean seemed less sure of his direction, but he chose regardless and they walked, passing a bottle of water between them to combat the humid heat. They passed abandoned vehicles, just sitting in the road, not flung onto their sides or ripped into scrap parts.

  “Anyone know how to hotwire a car?” joked Alli.

  “They’re dead,” Lynn said.

  “We only have Clint’s word on that,” Sean said, poking his head into a rolled-down window.

  “You think he’s lying?”

  “Unless these cars all ran out of gas at the same time, then probably not,” Sean said.