by Justin Bell
“Why?” asked Rhonda. “What’s the point?”
“Money? Power? They were a drug running group before, controlling most of the local meth supply and working with distributors in Canada on funneling heroin down through the I-29 corridor. Who knows, maybe they’re just a gang with too many guns and too many drugs in their system? They see the world swirling the drain and decide to play lawmen.”
“He’s right,” Greer interjected. “I’ve heard about them myself, though they hadn’t drifted as far west as Brisbee yet. Still, lots of stories, especially from guys I knew in State Police. But this was back before the detonations.”
“They probably figure law and order is a dead concept these days,” Jerry continued. “And they probably need volunteers to help production and distribution. If life is going to keep on being terrible for the foreseeable future, illicit drugs are about to become a Fortune 500 business. Everyone’s going to want to forget reality pretty soon.”
“So what you’re saying is maybe we should find an alternate route?” Phil asked.
“There is no alternate route,” Jeremiah replied. “If we’re going east, we’ve gotta go through Demon Dog territory. If we’re staying where we are, nuclear fallout. Not much choice, honestly.”
“You didn’t look like you were in a rush to leave,” Max said.
Jeremiah lifted his eyebrows. “Maybe, maybe not. I hadn’t much decided yet. Those friends of yours kind of made my decision for me.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Rhonda whispered.
“What else was I going to do, sit there and wait for my wife not to call? Whether she and my boy are alive, I need to face facts that they’re gone. Time to move on.”
The abrasive nature of his statement took Rhonda aback though she didn’t say anything. Winnie smiled at the man, drawn in by his frank, honest nature. The sweep of dirty blonde hair and the rugged, hard edge of his jawline certainly didn’t hurt.
“So what’s the plan?” Greer asked. “We’ve got a good team here. We need to stick together and stick it out.”
“Agreed,” said Angel, speaking for the first time in a while. Greer looked back at him.
“I think we need to move east as fast as we can. Try to get through the worst parts quickly and move on. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Jerry looked up at the pink hue of the sky, the sun crawling up towards dawn.
“Luck? Banking our future on luck? Not sure how much I like that plan,” Rhonda said. She started to rotate her shoulder, then stopped with a grimace halfway through. The movement of her face caused a flair of pain in her jaw and she closed her eyes, shaking her head slowly to avoid more pain. She was in rough shape.
“Not much choice, way I see it,” Jerry replied.
“I say we fill up the tanks, saddle up, and just ride until we can’t,” said Greer. “Rhonda, I hate to say it, but you should probably shack out in the trailer. I’m not sure how your shoulder will handle riding upright on an ATV and holding onto someone.”
Rhonda grimaced, not liking the idea, but in reality, there was probably little she could do about it.
“Make sure our ammo is full, too,” said Angel. Everyone around the circle took turns nodding their approval at the rough outline of the plan.
Max glanced over at Brad, who looked even more nervous than he had before. He took a step towards him.
“Sure you don’t want one?” he asked motioning to his pocket.
Brad shook his head. “No. I’ll be fine.”
In truth, he wasn’t sure any of them would be fine. Seven hundred miles on four-wheeled vehicles topping out at around thirty miles per hour? If they got a straight shot and plenty of fuel, they could be near St. Louis by this time tomorrow. Even if they stopped for sleep or a break, in two days he’d see his mom and dad again. He’d show them he was okay, and that he got back to them without crossing the line.
Then he could be happy. Then he would really be fine.
Chapter 7
Another day had come and another night Chunhua Liu had slept without her husband in her bed. She awoke early, just after six in the morning, and progressed through her normal routine: tea to drink, riding the resistance bike, breakfast, then a cold shower, because their hot water had not worked since the previous day. She wondered how long it would be before she’d be unable to heat water for tea. That was a day she didn’t want to think about.
Her routine finished before eight o’clock, she sat on the couch in the living room, trying to think of how she might occupy her time. She had rarely watched television, even when the power was more dependable, and-beyond communicating with her family back in China-rarely used the internet or social media. Chunhua was the epitome of introverted, preferring quiet time alone at home to any kind of busy activity. But here in America, even quiet time alone wasn’t so quiet and was rarely spent alone.
Their apartment was nice by Boston standards, but she heard everything that went on in the other rooms of the building and every passing car with sirens from several blocks around. Even if she wanted to barricade herself in her room and spend time knitting or doing crosswords, or just reading a book, she could always hear that telltale noise in the background, the roaring of cars passing or the faint blare of sirens.
Not that China was quiet. It’s nearly impossible to be quiet with so many bodies in such a contained area, but her particular village was small and peaceful, a quaint farming community where she could sit on the grass in her backyard and still end up surrounded by relative silence. Not so here.
Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to resent it, however. So introverted was Chunhua that even her anger was shy and directed inwards. Anger at herself for not adapting more quickly, frustration with her own understanding of society that she couldn’t manage to acclimate better. It was all on her, not on him. Chunhua retrieved her favorite book, dog-eared and worn and opened it on the table in front of her, reading as she drank her tea. This was how she spent most days, and in spite of her loneliness and her feeling out of place, the hours still droned on.
A slight twitch in her stomach told her that lunch time had come and gone and she walked to the window, noticing the sky was a faded, burnt orange, the opaque hue of mid-afternoon. Standing at the window, she looked outside over the empty streets, taken aback by the clear roads and vacant sidewalks. Isolated from her family or any native speakers, it had been difficult for her to quantify what was going on in the world, and as she looked down on the street, watching an obvious lack of cars drive by, she wondered if things in the world were more serious than she thought. They’d lived in this part of Boston, a hair’s width from Chinatown, for the past year and a half, and she couldn’t remember a single time when the streets were empty.
There was a rattle near the front door and she spun from the window. As she rounded the corner, the front door opened and Brandon Liu spilled out into the hall, looking dirt caked and tired, his uniform a rumpled mess, and the left side of his face a swollen bundle of knotted muscle.
“Brandon!” she shouted. “My goodness! What happened?” She strode to him and pressed her cool palms on his face, and he winced but did not pull away
“Hey, hon,” he replied. “Took a red eye back from Texas. Had to do a quick debrief, but they ordered me back home. Gave me an R & R day.”
“What is r and r?” his wife asked, helping him unbuckle his belt.
“Rest and relaxation,” Brandon replied, with a smile creasing his puffy face. “I do need to do some work, though,” he said, peeling off his dark blue shirt, revealing the stained and filthy white tank top underneath.
“You’ve been hurt,” she said, looking at him.
He nodded. “Nature of the job sometimes. I’ll get some ice on it. It’ll be fine.”
“You need a shower,” she said quietly. “We’ll get you cleaned up.”
“First, I need to check something,” he said, angling through the living room and out into a second bedroom which also served as a home office. Chunhua’s spin
bike was inside the small room as well as a tiny corner desk and a computer. Liu kicked off his clunky combat boots as he crossed the living room, then slipped into the small office, sweeping out his swivel chair and firing up the workstation computer.
“So what happened?” she asked, touching his hair.
“Things just got a little physical,” he said. “Lots of upset, confused, and angry people out there.”
She nodded as if she understood though she didn’t.
Liu whacked at the keyboard, and a soft chirping whine shrilled from underneath the desk. His department-issued computer contained a back-up dial-up modem, something he never thought he’d ever need, but in a world where broadband was crippled, the dedicated remote access server at the Department of Defense served as a way to keep critical assets talking even amongst a national outage.
Logging in with his secure password, a notification window sprang up, telling him he had a new message. Just as he had hoped, it looked to be from Ricky Orosco.
He read through the lines of text.
Liu-
Car confirmed registered to a Texas white supremacist named Karl Green. Guy is in charge of a localized militia movement, supposedly linked to some Branch Davidians from the whole Waco situation. So you were right, source of the vehicle is domestic. I have buddies searching for any links between Green and North Korea. This is pretty sensitive stuff, hope this line is truly secure.
-RO
Brandon sat back, taking a deep, long breath and thinking about the potential impact of this information. So far they had two separate links to local organizations involved in the largest attack on the United States in history. Local militia and cult movements supposedly unified and dedicated to assisting a foreign power in crippling the infrastructure of America.
Liu let his fingers dance over the keyboard.
RO-
Thanks, I was afraid of this. We have other evidence of local organizations affiliated with NK’s attacks. This opens a very large can of worms, so make sure whoever has this intel is someone you trust. I’m not sure how deep this goes.
-Liu
He punched the send key on the keyboard, his stomach knotting tight to match the tangled muscles in his face. Something was very, very wrong about all of this. Part of him hoped it was just some large coincidence, but in truth, he wasn’t sure.
Kramer had met him in Chicopee this morning when he’d landed and he’d given her a whole run down of the situation and she guarded her reaction to say the least. Guarded enough to make him a little uncomfortable about how forward he was being. The real question was why?
Why would they want to cover up the involvement of local organizations? Were they afraid of how unified and militarized these organizations were? Were they nervous about how the public would react to a vast domestic collaboration to bring down the American infrastructure? Did they just want to leverage the incident as an excuse to launch an offensive against North Korea?
Too many variables.
Liu pushed himself away from the small desk and stretched, wincing at the pain in his ribs and the swift stab of agony in the bunched flesh of his face. He needed a shower. He needed an icepack, and he needed to take a day where he didn’t think every single minute about the impending end of the world.
***
The notion of the end of civilization felt so obscure to the Frasers, even with all they’d been through. They’d seen small pockets of what the world was now, those tiny isolated instances of abrupt violence and disturbing human behavior. It wasn’t until they approached Interstate 70 again in the mid-morning of the third day of the end of the world that the notion that it very well might be the end of the world became so clear and so evident.
Cars stretched on, burying both lanes in each direction, front-to-back with no end in sight, going on for miles and miles. This wasn’t an isolated phenomenon; they’d seen this in their trek from Brisbee, and then from their home to here, but seeing the sheer number of seemingly abandoned vehicles really demonstrated the scope of what was going on in the world.
Some people wandered around the edge of the freeway, peeking in windows, looking towards the sky as if expecting some miracle to drop down and sweep them away. As if the rapture was just sitting there up in the clouds waiting to save them from this continued misery. But it wasn’t the people wandering around that really drew Winnie’s eye as she watched the length of I-70 from the front of one of the four-wheelers. It was the people on the ground. Several people were on the ground, scattered along the side of the wide two-land road heading eastbound. Some of them were lying flat as if taking a nap. Some were hunched over on their knees as if they’d been praying for something, then just fell asleep in the middle. Others were sprawled over the hoods of cars, lying contorted in the low grass of the median or near the shoulder of the highway itself.
There were corpses everywhere. In her mind, she knew they were corpses, she could tell by the stillness of their form and by the way their limbs splayed out that they were not still living, her mind told her this, but her eyes tried to deceive her. Her eyes tried to convince her that someone’s hand moved just enough, or that someone else’s chest was moving with the intake of air, even though she was too far away to see it.
Those people weren’t dead. They couldn’t be. People didn’t just die on the side of the road, and if they did, they weren’t just left there to be food for the predators. Even as she thought this, a large black crow appeared out of nowhere and descended upon one of the bodies lying in the median, landing on its chest and pecking at it. Winnie gasped and turned her head away as she drove, ignoring the sight and focusing on driving.
She thought of her mom. Rhonda lying back inside the trailer, thumping around over the shoulder and grass just beside this stretch of road. Rhonda was in no shape to drive, or even to hold on to someone else driving, but still, Winnie couldn’t imagine lying in the back of the dark trailer as the convoy pressed on, no idea where they were or where they were going.
Brad’s arms wrapped around Greer’s waist as the ATV thundered over the rough terrain just to the side of Interstate 70 and he, too, tried to avert his eyes as they passed by. Wandering men and women looked up at them as they passed, eyeing the four-wheelers with hungry eyes, as if they were full four-course meals or some kind of magic talisman capable of amazing feats of transportation. His eyes scanned from one to another, locking on the dazed, uncertain glare he saw in each of them. They reminded him of the looks of animals he saw in a documentary at school once…animals wandering around the yard at a slaughterhouse, just waiting for their inevitable fate. They’d already accepted what was going to happen, seemed to understand that there was no alternative, and were just counting the minutes until they didn’t have to think about it anymore.
Were his parents out there somewhere with that same look in their eyes? Were they out there wondering if he had that look in his eyes? He had to find them and show them that he wasn’t. Prove to them that he didn’t follow in his brother’s footsteps.
Jerry eased up on the throttle of his four-wheeler and drifted back, coming up even with Greer, Max clinging to his back as Brad was.
“See those on the ground?” he asked, gesturing towards where they were riding. Greer glanced down and saw them at once. Motorcycle tracks. Dozens of them winding in and around each other, carving narrow trenches in the packed dirt and grass.
“You said the Demon Dogs are a biker gang?” Phil shouted over the dull roar of the ATV engines. Jerry nodded.
It seemed endless, their trek east along the straight shot of the four lane highway, with each pair of lanes separated by the thick grass median. Cars of all makes and models blocked the path, and as they moved along, hour after hour they saw the same types of scenery. The wandering lost, the smoldering husks of burnt out vehicles, and the darkened lumps of dead things, people who had escaped this brutal reality into some other time and place. Perhaps they were the lucky ones.
“You smell that?” Winni
e asked Phil as she pulled up next to him. It was Angel’s turn to sit in the trailer and watch over Rhonda, keeping her steady as they went rolling over the uneven terrain, so Winnie had some wheel time, which she was relishing. Phil scrunched his nose and nodded. He did smell it. Something dark and dusky. Something smoky. Something burning. He could feel a light breeze coming at him from the south and wondered what was carrying along with it.
At least maybe Rhonda was free from the smell back inside the trailer. That was one potential upside to being penned into that dark metal container.
Jerry came up on their right. “You smell it, too?” he asked. Winnie and Phil both looked at him and nodded. Phil returned his gaze to the ground in front of him, but Winnie couldn’t help but let her eyes linger on Jeremiah just for a few extra moments.
“It’s Wichita,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over the roaring engines.
“Seriously?” Phil asked.
Jerry nodded. “City’s on fire. Almost the whole thing.”
“There was a detonation in Wichita?” Winnie asked, her voice breaking on the cusp of frantic.
“Nope,” Jerry replied, shaking his head. “People just went a little nuts. Worried about all of these nuclear bombs, started getting paranoid. The whole city just kind of combusted overnight, way I hear it.”
Phil just shook his head. They’d been riding for hours already and they’d promised themselves they’d try to push on through, but the sky was darkening and the sun shrinking down towards the horizon, and the further they went, the more Phil thought they’d have to stop for the night. If for nothing else then to make sure Rhonda was getting along okay.
“What do you think about finding a place to crash for the night?” Phil asked Jerry.
Jerry shrugged, not looking too happy about the idea. “I don’t know, man, dangerous place to do it. But on the flip side, none of us got much sleep last night, and if one of us falls asleep at the wheel, it could ruin a lot of days.”