Hell Happened (Book 3): Hell Released

by Terry Stenzelbarton

  “Maybe I’m not alive,” he said to himself. “Maybe this is dead.”

  CJ stood up and started to walk. He stumbled once or twice before getting his balance. He didn’t know where he was going. He was just going to walk until something changed.

  He walked to the highway and started in the direction of his home, but the crevasse created by the earthquake had split the highway keeping him from walking back south.

  CJ walked north. He walked on the highway, pasts wrecked cars, some with bodies still in them. Interstate 5 was a mess. The concrete was torn up and cracks left broken chucks of the road bed scattered. Some were small enough for CJ to kick, other pieces of the highway were the size of small cars.

  CJ’s mind was blank while he walked. He heard the winds crossing the fields and the sounds of animals in the distance. Some sounded like they were in pain. CJ didn’t care. He walked with no destination in mind. He walked without care.

  Just before sunset CJ trudged up an incline and saw the Sacramento water tower he’d seen a thousand times on the way into the city. Eight of the 16 pylons on which supported the huge reservoir were bent and misshapen. The tank itself looked on the verge of falling and water was spraying out through leaks in the plumbing.

  CJ stopped and watched the water flow from the tank. Something about the water fascinated him. Eventually it made him realize he had to go to the bathroom.

  A Chevy Cobalt’s tire looked like a good place to go so he did.

  It was almost dark and all the cars and trucks on the road that were still upright had dead bodies in them. Through the trees to his right he saw some houses. He walked off the highway and down the hill to them. The first ones he walked by were damaged to a greater or lesser extent to where CJ didn’t want to go inside.

  The fourth one had a broken porch but otherwise didn’t look overly damaged. He walked up to the front door and turned the knob on the double doors. They creaked but opened. The place was empty.

  CJ walked inside the darkened house. It had a large sectional in the living room and CJ lay down on it and fell asleep. He didn’t think about the oddness of just walking into some strange house and falling asleep on the couch. He didn’t think at all. He was tired, it was getting dark, and it was a house.

  His sleep was troubled. He had nightmares about the corpses he’d seen in the family cemetery, mixed with destruction of his friend’s place by the earthquake.

  His mind was playing with him while he slept. He saw the faces of his parents and his friends and the girls with whom he’s shared a bed. He saw his manager and trainer, opponents and teammates. It was a cacophony of faces and sounds all rushing at him in his dreams. His exhausted, tortured and hungry body needed sleep after the abuse he’d put it through the previous day, but his mind was filled with the memories that were fighting to push him over the precipice of the chasm of insanity.

  His nightmare became more real to him when he felt he was in a storm, one of the many that rushed in from the Pacific Ocean and would bring torrents of rain and wind to the estate he lived on with his parents.

  In his dream, he felt himself lifted by a wave of water that washed away the bodies of his parents and other family members that had been buried in the cemetery out back of the house in which he grew up. He could feel himself floating away with the bodies of the dead and in his dream he screamed.

  His screaming woke him up. He sat up in the dark, strange house. He remembered vaguely breaking into the house and falling onto the sectional and falling into his fitful sleep.

  His feet hit the floor and water soaked through his tennis shoes and socks. He was in water up to mid shin.

  Clarity came to CJ slowly when he stood up. More water was coming into the house through the open door. He wasn’t hearing any heavy rain and didn’t think river which flowed from Sacrament to Sherman Lake out to the west would be over its banks.

  CJ stood up and waded through the living room to get out of the house. It was still before dawn outside, but there was enough light for CJ to see the yard and the street in front of the house. They were flooded with murky water and floating bodies and cars. The smell of the water assaulted his nose and the sight sickened him.

  The water was quickly getting deeper and CJ’s only escape was to head back up the embankment he’d stumbled down the previous night. The water hadn’t gotten to the road height and it was the only place that looked safe.

  It took 15 minutes of slogging through the brackish water to get to the roadbed. Twice he was almost pulled under by the flow of water, but he was able to use trees in the yards to help pull him through.

  Once he got to the road, the sun was just cresting the horizon. CJ looked over to where he’d spent the night. The houses were being flooded and pushed off their foundations. The house he had spent the night in was being twisted and demolished by the rushing water.

  He was glad the morning wasn’t as cold as the previous mornings and took off his wet shoes and socks.

  Sitting on the side of I-5, CJ watched in muted awe at the raw power of the water. He was 35 feet above the water level as it was now, but it was still rising. He looked back the way he’d come and the road, while torn up from the earthquake, was still above the water level.

  Looking up toward Sacramento, he saw the direction he had been headed was also still above water.

  CJ looked at the sky. There were a few high clouds, and he could see some leftover dust from the earthquake and early morning fog off to the west. Looking straight up he saw a few stars that hadn’t yet been overwhelmed by the sun that would soon come up over the horizon.

  “Hey God!” CJ hollered. “You missed me again! I’m still alive and didn’t drown.

  “What’s the matter God, can’t kill me? You’ve tried pretty hard but I keep living. I’m not going to die now. I’m going to keep living just to piss you off, God. You’re not so powerful if you can’t kill a little guy like me.

  “Come on, God! Is that all you got? Plagues and earthquakes and floods?”

  “Come on, God is that the best you can do? Why not blow up the whole frickin’ world and be done with it?

  “Face it, God,” CJ screamed skyward, shaking his fist at the sky. “I beat you again!”

  CJ started laughing a faux jovial sound to the heavens. “You’re a joke, God. You’re not so tough if I lived through all your shit.”

  At the top of his lungs he screamed one more time, “You’re just a joke!”

  The echo of his scream could be heard over the rushing water off to the side of the road. CJ stood there and listened to the echo die in the distance.

  God must have been a woman, because the next voice he heard was “Hey, over here!”

  CJ was startled by her voice. She was so far away he could barely see her. She was waving some piece of clothing at him.

  CJ squinted. “Over here, mister! Hey! Over here!” she hollered again. “Hey.”

  It was the first voice he’d heard, besides his own, since his dad had died. In his state of mind, he wasn’t sure if she was real or not. He’d been hollering at God, challenging Him, and the woman might be just another rug to pull from under him.

  He squinted again in her direction. There were more people than just her at the base off ramp where he saw the woman. She was the only one who was hollering but he could see in the gaining sunlight that there were others.

  CJ looked back at the sky. “Good one, God. Who is she? Some psycho?”

  The sky didn’t answer.

  CJ reached down and picked up his shoes and socks. He could stay where he was or go see who the lady was, or just walk the other way. He shrugged to himself and began walking toward the voice that was calling him. He had to be careful because of the debris on the roadway, but he was in no hurry.

  As he got closer to the group of people, he could see there were 20 or 30 people on the ramp. They were clumped into groups of four or five each but it was the woman who was coming forward to meet him. She must be the leader of the
group.

  She met him a few hundred feet from the rest of the people. She was a large woman wearing clothes that were cleaner and dryer than what CJ was wearing. He could tell she was also armed.

  “Hey, mister,” she said when she was about 15 feet from him. She stopped in the road and made hand motions that he too should stop.

  “Tired. Hungry. Flood. God is pissed at me,” was all he could think to respond to her greeting. He squatted down on the pavement. His feet were hurting from walking on the roadbed.

  “Oh you poor dear,” she said, slinging the rifle she carried over her shoulder. “Come on. We got some food. Not much, but some.”

  CJ struggled to get his wet shoes on. She helped with the second shoe and helped him to his feet. “I’m Jocelyn, but everyone calls me Josie or just Jo,” she said, putting his arm over her shoulder and helping him to his feet. “How in hell have you survived the earthquake and flood all by yourself?”

  CJ shook his head. “I’m not sure I did. I’m not sure you’re not still the bad nightmare I’ve been having.”

  Jo laughed as they got closer to the others. “I might be a nightmare, but I’m not yours.”

  “Hey, come here and give me a hand, you guys,” she said to the people on the ramp. “What’re you waiting for?” No one moved with alacrity. If they were anything like CJ, they were feeling beaten and knocked down, but a few moved to help.

  It was a girl about 17 years old who thought she recognized him. “Aren’t you that tennis player…what’s his name…AJ or RJ or something?”

  CJ smiled a real smile for the first time in almost a month. “Close. CJ. CJ Perry.”

  “Welcome to hell, CJ,” the girl said plainly as she and Jo helped CJ find a comfortable place to sit down.

  “Thanks, but I’ve been in hell for the past month. This isn’t much different.”

  Jo pulled three Slim Jims out of her vest pocket for CJ. “Here you go kid. You look like you need these more than me.” It was true, thought CJ. Jo, CJ figured her to be in her late 30s, had quite a few extra pounds on her, but CJ didn’t say it and was grateful for the food.

  As he was eating, Jo and a few others in the group that were sitting on the ramp talked about their fates. They had been a group of nearly 200 who had survived the plague from the Sacramento area. When the earthquake hit, most of their group had been killed in the buildings they had taken refuge in.

  Jo told how she didn’t have a home to go to. She’d been an independent truck driver with no close family. She’d been living in her cab when the plague hit and had no place to go. “My life, for the past 15 years has been on the road,” she told him. “If I was going to die like everyone else, I wanted to see everything I could of the U.S. of A.

  “I was driving up I-5 when I came across this group.” She waved her hand at the people sitting on the ramp, looking broken and beaten down…just like CJ presumed he looked.

  “They had food and water and were making the best of the worst situation when the earth started shaking. My rig was swallowed whole just after I climbed out of it,” she told him, wiping her short black hair out of her face. “We all ran away from the buildings and watched as the building in and around Sacramento fell. Fires started and there were explosions everywhere.

  “We’ve been walking since yesterday. We don’t know where we’re going, but Sacramento is gone,” she told him. She spoke with deep sadness at the loss of life and the situation everyone here was in.

  “Where were you all going then?” he asked Jo, taking the bottle of water offered to him by the 17-year-old girl.

  “Don’t know,” the girl said. “My mom and dad were two of the first to die. That was almost a month ago and I’ve been waiting to die ever since.” She sat down next to Jo and leaned against the larger woman. Jo put an ample arm around the girl. CJ thought the girl looked ready to cry but after all the tears she’d probably shed over the past month, she’d probably cried all her tears out.

  “Where were you headed?” asked Jo after comforting the girl.

  CJ ran his fingers through his blonde hair and wiped his face. “Honestly, I don’t know. I was at my dead friend’s house yesterday and the quake hit. I just started walking and fell asleep in a house back that way.” He pointed with his head. “I woke up this morning to find a river flowing through the house.”

  One of the older men wobbled down to where they were sitting. “It is probably a tidal wave that was caused by the earthquake.” He sat down next to Jo and looked at her. “We’re going to need food and water and shelter before the end of the day Jo,” and then looking over at the girl, “and Teddy is looking for you Chloe.”

  Chloe’s shoulders dropped, but she slowly got to her feet and walked back up the hill to who he presumed was Teddy, a young boy about eight or ten years old and the youngest in the group.

  Jo pointed with her chin. “Teddy lost two brothers and three sisters along with his parents. Chloe found him sitting somewhere and he’s kind of adopted her.”

  CJ nodded. The boy was wearing nice, but dirty clothes, and had probably been a normal kid that could be seen in any city or town in the United States when there had been one. Now he looked like a frightened child who had no idea about why the world was treating him as it had and had latched on to the first person who could provide him some security – Chloe.

  “What do you know about earthquakes and tidal waves, mister?” CJ asked the older man before finishing the bottle of water Chloe had brought him.

  “John, John Smith. I used to be a fifth grade teacher at Crocker Riverside Elementary, not far from here. I know a little, just enough to teach fifth graders about tectonic plates and how we’ve been expecting this earthquake since 1989. That was when San Francisco was hit during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Remember the World Series that was interrupted?” Everyone who was listening nodded.

  “What’s that got to do with the flooding?” CJ asked, flipping the empty bottle in his hands.

  “I’m just guessing, but I bet part of the tectonic plate that runs under San Francisco, part of the San Andreas Fault Line, slipped into the ocean yesterday and displaced billions of gallons of water and left a big hole in California. When the land pushed the water out to sea, the waves probably raced across the Pacific and then came rushing back.

  “Depending on where the epicenter of the quake was and how much of California fell into the ocean, water could have washed up as far as the mountains. This water probably came up through San Francisco and San Pablo Bay, between Vallejo and Concord. If water is rushing up this far, I’d guess Oakland and Fairfield, Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista are probably wiped off the map. Stockton probably suffered the same fate as Sacramento. If we go back that way, we’ll probably find the city in flames.”

  “So, where do you suggest we go, Professor?” CJ asked the older man.

  The man chuckled. It sounded hollow and a little forced. “I was never smart enough to be a professor.”

  “Right now, you’re the smartest man I know, and probably the smartest man on earth,” CJ told him.

  “I’m not in charge here. I’m just a follower who hasn’t had the good sense to die yet. Ed was in charge of this group, but he and his sons died back there in Sacramento.”

  Jo put a hand on Smith’s arm. They’d lost more than two-thirds of their group who had survived the plague. The people, with whom they had bonded and came to depend on with the death of millions of others, had been killed by the quake and all of them were feeling like God had slapped them down.

  “We were headed south to get away from the city. We didn’t have any destination in mind,” Jo said. “We were thinking there were probably some people from the LA area who might be still alive. We really don’t know where to go.”

  CJ thought for a few moments in the silence. He heard one of the kids in the group say he was hungry.

  “My folks owned a lot of property south of here. I was there yesterday when the quake hit. All the buildings were knocked do
wn and the highway between here and there is wrecked beyond driving on, but I bet we could be there by this afternoon.”

  “Why go there if all the buildings were knocked down?” Jo asked. “Shouldn’t we go farther inland away from the water?”

  “Jack, a friend of mine, was the manager of one of our companies called Survival Shelter, Inc. I’ll bet some of the shelters survived the quake and I bet they’re still above the water level. It’ll give us a safe place to stay out of the weather and someplace warm. I know the place had a lot of generators so we can have heat and lights when the sun goes down.”

  “Why would you leave there if there were survival shelters?” Smith asked him.

  CJ pursed his lips and looked down. He didn’t want to tell them he had been stoned out of his mind and not thinking correctly when he left the place. “I was looking for anyone else who might have survived the earthquake,” he lied.

  Jo asked him how far it was and CJ told her they could probably reach the property by mid-afternoon it they didn’t run into trouble. “We’ve had nothing but trouble, CJ. All we can do now is walk the path God has laid out for us.”

  “If there is a God, He must be pretty pissed at me because my ‘path’ is one hell after the next,” CJ said getting to his feet. Jo and John got to their feet too. The others in the group started standing up and walking over to them.

  “CJ here says there might be some survival shelters a few miles from here. They might be our best bet for getting out of the weather and protect us from the beasts of the night.” There were mumbles and grumbles, but everyone got to their feet and picked up their back packs or whatever they were carrying their worldly belongings in.

  The group started back the way CJ had walked the previous night. It was slow going. The oldest person in the group was in her late 50s and the youngest was the young boy who had attached himself to Chloe.

  The first obstacle was the water flowing over the highway. They’d walked about a mile and crossed the bridge over Freeport Boulevard and the flooding had crossed the highway into the housing development east of the highway. The topology of the land forced them east into the development at the highway sign that said 37 miles to Stockton.