by Angela White
Split between broken states that had only small areas capable of sustaining life, most people tried to get out of the cities. Searching for safety and unaware that it no longer existed; millions more were lost in the aftermath. At dawn, the American people were confident and arrogant about their future. By dusk, the dream was crushed, faith not only shaken, but also mortally wounded.
Less than a week after the war, the death toll stood at two hundred and fifty million in the United States alone. Millions of those who survived the initial blasts were seriously injured or blinded, and another seven million had radiation sickness. Most of those injured by the war didn’t live to welcome in the New Year.
The numbers were staggering, inconceivable, and yet, real. Our worst fears had been proven true. The horribly high cost of freedom was paid for with the blood of the innocent, as debts like these, in the end, always are. The people should have been prepared, ready, and instead, the governments hurt their citizens as much as the actual bombs did. The draft took tens of thousands of desperately needed doctors, scientists, nurses, engineers, and it stripped farms and factories alike of their crops and livestock, leaving their owners’ bodies rotting where they fell. They took it all.
Some people fled before the president’s broadcast aired, tipped off by determined sources as the governments began locking down the internet. A few of those quick-thinking souls survived, but flight was not an option for most people. There were loved ones and supplies to be gathered first, and by then, the roads were crammed with traffic and accidents, and were impassable. It forced those people to either wait in their cars for the convoys of draft trucks or set out on foot to find somewhere to hide.
Those were the people who fled too late and got caught out in the open with all those who had already been on the road for the holiday. The rest of us hunkered down where we were and hoped our town wasn’t a direct target, or near to one.
The war came when we weren’t guarding against it…and then life became hard.
Chapter Two
The Storm Tracker
January 1st, 2013
Outside Bonneville, Wyoming
1
“There’s a storm coming.”
Samantha’s tone was low, respectful in the cold, Wyoming wind, but it didn’t matter.
“Tell us something we don’t know. It’s rained every day since you geniuses blew us up!” her captor lashed out.
Flinching, Samantha ducked her head, dirty blonde curls hiding a pale, bruised face full of loathing. Instead of arguing, she poked at their reluctant fire with her once expensive shoe, observing the creepy darkness of the highway overpass around them. The clinking echo of the heavy chain around her ankle made her quit before Melvin could tell her to. Now was a bad time to draw attention.
Samantha had never hated anyone as much as she did the two drunken men sprawled carelessly in lawn chairs behind her. They were warm in their paint-stained overalls and long johns, but she shivered miserably in the same torn, reeking office clothes she’d been taken in. She wanted to be alone inside their rusty van, out of the icy wind, and searching for something she could use as a weapon, but the two males liked to wait until she was nearing frostbite before climbing in behind her to take what they wanted.
The wind blew harder, bringing sounds of dogs yapping incessantly in hunger and thin, distant screams, loud bangs they couldn’t identify. Sam tried to huddle into a ball that would keep it all out. The thought of sex while there were bodies rotting in cars around them made her stomach lurch. It was supposed to be Henry’s night–the younger of the Cruz Painting Company brothers who were sharing her–but Melvin was making shot after shot of Wild Turkey disappear. When he got like this, both Samantha and Henry gave him what he wanted to keep him from getting bent out of shape. Melvin was mean and bitter when he was sober, but he was a violent drunk.
Instant dick, she thought, skimming the vague shapes of farmhouses and fields at the other end of the windy overpass. Just add alcohol.
Blackness surrounded them in every direction. There wasn’t a speck of light except for their tiny fire. Gently touching her swollen lip, Samantha tried not to think about the horrors she couldn’t identify through the dark. The two with her were enough.
“Where we gonna go, Mel? It’s all trashed.”
Melvin took another long swig from the dirty brown bottle, dug at the filthy crotch under his large stomach. “Nah, man. Not south. We’ll stock up and go to Mexico. Take over like the A-Team.”
“Don’t hafta go on no boat, do we?”
“Prob’ly.” Melvin’s voice was distracted, bloodshot leer on the pale leg showing from beneath Samantha’s grimy skirt, staring at his own thumbprint on her calf.
“Ain’t goin’ on no boat,” Henry whined, blowing out a hard belch.
Melvin gestured toward Sam, his mean smile showing yellow, broken teeth. He threw a small rock at her, hard, and both men laughed when she cried out in pain.
Knowing the overweight alcoholics were hoping she’d fight, Samantha let their laughter wash over her as she listened to the terribly angry earth around them, resisting the urge to dig at her dirty hair or rub her stinging hip.
The two abusive pigs, who were keeping her captive and passing her like…like a bottle, assumed she meant a thunderstorm, but it suggested snow to her–maybe even a Blue Norther–and about the weather, Samantha was hardly ever wrong. Her predictions had earned her the pass to safety…had given her this hell instead, but she didn’t consider trying to tell them again that a storm was coming. The longhaired, thirty-something-year-old painters liked to pinch and slap as punishments, and she was already covered in bruises. Keeping her mouth shut was a hard lesson to learn.
Get away. Try again! her heart demanded. The wind suddenly blew harder through the Wyoming basin as if to reinforce the thought.
Sam shivered. The wounds and marks from her first attempt had mostly healed, but the damage to her self-respect never would. Not that she had time for something as trivial as that. Only survival mattered now.
The trio tensed at a loud bang echoing from the west, but when a second shot didn’t come, the men returned to their bottle, and their slave resumed her desperate plans. She was a fighter. She just needed to stack the battle.
Closing her eyes, Samantha inhaled deeply. There would definitely be snow to usher in the New Year, and before morning, too. Could it help her? Maybe, if she manipulated things a little. Right now, the two men were drinking heavily. Set to stay up late and wake up even later, what would they do upon rising to a foot of snow on the ground?
She frowned. They would take the way they had already cleared to get this far and return to the other end of the overpass–to the deserted farmhouse they’d stayed in last night. The brothers would hole up and wait out the weather, even though they were only an hour from moving the last of the abandoned vehicles out of their way before they’d be in the Bonneville city limits–an ugly place full of the dead and the wails of those who would soon follow.
The thought of being snowed in with these horny idiots filled her gut with hot fire, and her mind worked on the problem while her stomach burned. She had always been a plan-ahead person, but who the hell could have prepared for this? What she needed was for the heartless drunks to sleep now and get up ready to go on, before the snow got bad. It would put them all out in the blizzard together and might give her an opportunity to escape.
You know how, don’t you?
She shuddered, drawing in a deep breath. Yes, she did, but she didn’t want to, couldn’t stand even the thought of being the one who started it, let alone having to participate or pretend she was willing. What she needed was a weapon. It would be easier to kill them.
Sam ached to think of possible help at the Essex Compound being so close and yet so far away, but she would do what she had–
Pop-Pop-Pop!
The sound of engines and tires squealing followed the loud gunshots, echoing from the total darkness to the south. Coming
their way?
“Shit! They’re back!”
“Henry, get that fire out!”
Samantha was already climbing into the van as fast as the loudly clinking chain around her ankle would allow, as eager for the tepid warmth as for the hiding place. She slid onto the bed in the rear of the van, and they were plunged into darkness when the two men piled in behind her, slamming the door. She didn’t struggle when Melvin pulled her roughly between them.
The males cleared tiny circles on the dirty windows. Samantha kept her head down. She would be shoved away if she tried to peer, but she found she could easily imagine the loud group that was now within at least half a mile of the overpass where they were hiding.
There would be only lights at first, and gunshots, and then dirty, muddy, rusted-out jeeps and trucks with gun racks. There would be cruel shouts and mean gestures, scared, abused women cowering in trunks and on floorboards, their futures grim–short. All of it surrounded with dangerous, reckless driving, shooting at anything that caught their attention, and a complete disregard for all the death that had already occurred.
Danger filled the air as the noises got louder and the barely-breathing trio in the van remained still and silent. As the group got closer, slugs began to slam into the overpass. Bullets hit the cars around them and then the van, making Sam bite her wrist to keep from screaming. The gang drove by very slowly, it seemed to her, headlights glaring off the dirty windows. None of them budged.
They were all glad when the men avoided the jammed-up overpass from Interstate 26, traveling below it instead. They seemed to be going directly into Bonneville, where desperate voices on the van’s CB radio had been calling for help for the last few days–for American assistance.
What they’re calling for and what’s coming, Sam thought, trying to ignore the hands now roaming her sore body from both sides, are as opposite as they can be.
As the last of the engine noises faded, the van began to rock. Gently at first, it soon became violent and a scream echoed. Full of pain, the sound was cut off suddenly, and a light, freezing rain began to fall over the broken land.
2
A short (Long! So long! her mind screamed.) hour later, the brothers were passed out in the back, and Samantha was in the front passenger seat, as far away from them as the rawhide leash around her neck would allow. Full of cold depression, she longed for even a cup of charbucks coffee as she shivered and hurt. She wiped away a single tear at the thought of where she’d been at this time two weeks ago–at the rear table with a paper cup, the car and driver idling in front. What a difference from this hell.
She had been with the abusive brothers for ten days now, had turned twenty-eight in captivity, and for Samantha, who knew where two government compounds were, it had been beyond awful. She’d begged them repeatedly to take her to a bunker so that someone could verify she was supposed to be inside. She had even promised to get them passes. A lie, of course–she’d hoped to get the evil men shot–but it hadn’t mattered. They did not intend to give up the slave that had literally dropped from the sky into their laps.
Samantha shivered at the thought of that first night. It had been life changing, and no one had helped her. Not the convoys full of draftee’s and soldiers as they rolled by, loaded down and certainly not the terrified citizens that were fleeing ahead of them. She’d watched unarmed men be shot down, women beaten–her dreams were full of the haunting cries of the others who were now in the same situation that she was.
It had taken days to stop herself from calling out to those around them for help, before she realized that even the police with all their expensive gear and years of training hadn’t stood, hadn’t even been able to save themselves. In most of the places she’d been dragged through, the uniformed dead outnumbered the civilians. They’d lost everything. It was all gone, and she was stuck in the middle of it with men who knew she had been one of the chosen few valued by the government, and tormented her for it.
When the war came, Sam had been mostly alone but content. Her needs were met by her butler and servants, and then by the agency staff when she’d taken over her parents’ work after they were killed trying to measure a tropical storm during the height of hurricane season. A year into that wild ride, she had predicted the Supercell in Nebraska during the Democratic National Committee–had maybe even saved President Milton’s miserable life–and that was how she’d ended up here.
Samantha was used to being cared for, but thankfully, she was also strong, able to face her terror and still react. It made her a formidable opponent in that she didn’t fear death, only the pain, and becoming a storm tracker like her parents had been as natural as breathing. She had guts and she would have to use them now.
The aching woman lit one of her “reward” cigarettes and studied the darkness through the dirty window. They would be on her in an instant if she tried to run for it now. She had to be patient. The rain splatters were fading to light gray sleet, covering the dead world around them, and she ignored her pain, calculating. The next eighteen hours would be hard, but if she was careful, if she picked just the right moment, this time tomorrow she would be free.
3
Samantha wasn’t sure if it was the icy cold or the bands of pain low in her stomach that woke her to day eleven of captivity, but she came fully alert all at once, mind immediately going to the plan she had been working on before falling asleep.
She had decided she wouldn’t go to the Essex Compound. On the chopper, the soldier had told them it was being evacuated. It was the direction she’d seen radiation victims coming from. Plus, the brothers knew to follow her there. She couldn’t take the chance that they would hunt her down and capture her again. If they did, she’d get no further opportunities to run. This was her last try, and Sam took another long minute, preparing herself to follow through, no matter how ugly it got.
Stomach shifting uncomfortably, Samantha stretched her arm over and started the van’s engine. As she flipped on the heater, she told herself at least she wouldn’t have a baby. She’d had a shot the day before the war, and it was good for three months.
“What...uh? What’re you doing?” Melvin questioned groggily, elbowing Henry.
Samantha struggled to breathe normally as the wipers cleared a vision into a wintery hell, surprised the weather had muffled so much of the sound. We slept through it, she thought sickly, and hoped the gang had traveled on in the night.
Bonneville was in flames, the smoke was the only thing moving, and it firmed her decision. Today had to be the day. She wasn’t going in there. No one who ventured into that warzone would come out unscathed on the other side. They would be lucky to emerge at all.
“I think that city is on fire.” She didn’t bother telling them it was also snowing.
Her words got Melvin up, as she’d known they would, and he woke Henry. While Sam was glad that something had happened to get the painters moving, she worried that her freedom might come at the cost of innocent lives. Had she made it happen with her hurting wishes? Was she responsible?
Sam’s grieving mind said she knew better. They had hidden from those men before, seen the smoke and fires from the direction they went. The group was attacking towns, trying to… What? Eliminate the survivors? That fit, and her heart cried in protest at the loss of people she hadn’t even known.
Someone has to do something, has to fight back, Samantha thought, never considering the possibility that she would become one of those heroes.
When Melvin and Henry stepped outside, she gently started searching the front for anything she could use as a weapon if they did decide to wait in the farmhouse. This was the first time they had left her alone inside the van, and she was very quiet.
“No way is your girl there, man. Look at all those flames.”
Melvin scanned the storm clouds that were currently raining ashy flakes over them. “Gail’ll be there. I told her to stay.”
“I don’t know, man.” Henry was staring at the roof of the farmho
use they could barely detect. It wasn’t his girlfriend, and he clearly didn’t want to go where there was such obvious danger.
“I do. We’ll make it by dark. We gotta get started moving shit again.”
“It’s an overpass, Mel. No stores if the storm gets bad.”
Melvin waved a dirty hand. “These cars’re the grocery now–and we’re not stuck anywhere. The van’ll go through any storm, even a Norther.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
There was deep reluctance in Henry’s voice, probably because of the rotting corpses in so many of the cars.
Melvin’s laughter was mean. “The bitch’ll hunt for supplies while we’re shovin’ that bus over. We’ll chain her to the bumper like usual.”
Samantha’s gut clenched with nervous anger and hope. Maybe she would find a real weapon while searching those cars.
“Turn off that engine! Get out here, slut! Time to earn your keep.”
Samantha was careful to put heavy loathing into her voice. “In the snow?”
She could hear them snickering as she pulled the keys from the ignition with trembling hands and stuffed them up under the dash. Hopefully the jumble of wires would hide the keys long enough to buy her a head start if fate gave her the chance to run…although she wasn’t sure she would now. There was too much hate to scurry away.
“Yes, in the snow! Come on!”
Melvin opened the side door, and Sam quickly pulled on her flats.
“Get out here.”
He leaned inside, and she tried to control her voice and pounding heart. This was it. “I’m in a skirt. I’ll freeze.”
“Then hurry up and find some clothes in them cars out there–for you too, but only dresses or skirts. My women don’t wear the pants; I do.”
Samantha nodded obediently. Wanting desperately to spit in his face, she held her leg out for him to clamp the hated tow-chain over the raw, bruised skin of her ankle and sighed in relief when he yanked the rawhide leash from her neck.