Annihilation (The Seamus Chronicles Book 1)

by McAdams, K. D.

  I hear the door behind me creak open. Remembering my fragile brain, I turn slowly to look. It’s Grace, and she is tumbling out the door onto the roadway. As quickly as I can, I go over and help her up. She’s not steady, but she can stand okay. By the time she is oriented, Liam is in the doorway, ready to climb out. He does not appear any worse for the wear, but I’m sure that, like me, he is suffering from bruised ribs and a sore waistline from the seat belt.

  Grace starts around the car to the passenger side and Liam and I follow. She goes right to the front door for Sofie. It’s the first time I’m really looking at the front end. It is completely caved in and I can see Sofie’s airbag through the window. Grace cannot open the door; the damage is too severe. But she won’t give up, and she keeps pulling and straining.

  The fact that Dad and Sofie may be dead highlights the damage in my skull. I cannot comprehend what that would mean. I cannot form a next step or an action plan. If Dad is gone, here—wherever we are—is the end of the road. We all die with him. I know I can’t give up like this, but I also know that my brain is not functioning well enough to push on.

  Grace starts pounding on the window. “Sofie! Wake up!” She’s speaking loudly but not yelling. I don’t know if there is a physical reason for her volume control or if she is worried about alerting someone to our presence. There is no way she could have identified the roadblock.

  Liam is pushing Grace out of the way to get to the window. He has a rock in his hand and he is going to break the glass. As he pulls back to smash, Sofie’s head rolls to the side and her eyes open. “Close your eyes and look the other way. We’re going to get you out,” Liam tells her calmly.

  The glass breaks easily and Liam uses a shard to fully deflate the airbag. In what seems like one fluid motion, Sofie half-climbs, is half-pulled through the window and placed on the road. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” she keeps repeating. She looks okay; I think her nose is broken, but, like the rest of us, she is struggling to get her thinking together.

  After a few minutes on the ground, Sofie is up on her feet. She leans on Liam for support and starts surveying the scene. We haven’t checked on Dad and no one has mentioned him either. It’s odd. Sofie survived; why not him? I guess that we are so used to him being okay through everything he never needs to be checked on. In fact, I would bet that Grace and Liam assume he is out of the car and told me to take care of them while he looks for a new ride and a way out of this mess.

  The four of us are standing together in silence behind the crumpled Escalade. My eyes have adjusted to the dark completely. I am reading the logos on the tractor-trailer cabs when a sudden blinding light sends me reeling. Grace and Sofie both spin into my chest and I instinctively put my arms around them. I can feel Liam beside me, leaning into our pile. In the background, I hear a generator running. That must be where the power for the lights is coming from.

  After standing motionless for a few minutes, I want to check on Dad. But I am worried what will happen. The lights were not motion-activated; there was way too long of a delay for that. Someone turned them on. Strangely, I am not worried about what would happen to me. I’m worried for the others if I make a sudden move or give the appearance of trying to escape. I’ve never put others’ well being ahead of my own. Is it Sofie or am I just maturing?

  In front of us we hear a shuffling sound that is not labored but certainly not energetic or agile. Perhaps whoever set this roadblock was asleep and we have woken them with our crash. There is definitely more than one person there, but I can’t tell if it is two, three or more. A click that I have only heard two or three times before raises the hair on the back of my neck. Our hosts have chambered a round in their shotgun.

  When the two figures come into view, I am almost relieved at their frailty. Even I could take them in a fair fight. But this isn’t a fair fight. They have guns and we don’t. To make matters worse, they look drunk, or high, or a combination of the two. Wouldn’t it be ironic if crystal meth were the cure for the “killer cold.” I don’t think I could do that to my body or my brain even if the alternative were death.

  “Woohoo, they got girls for us!” shouts the man on my left. He’s not a farmer or a laborer of any kind. “Hillbilly” is the only description that comes to mind.

  The one on the right must be the brains of the operation. He is standing a little more upright and appears to have one tooth more than his friend.

  “Where you all goin’ in such a hurry?” The leader is speaking to me like I am somehow in charge. “We don’t take kindly to people driving on our highway without permission.” He gets it out just before a small coughing fit.

  “We were headed to California.” I want to add “before you two idiots almost killed us,” but I hold my tongue. He has the “killer cold” and will be dead within 36 hours, but that shotgun of his can wreak havoc on us before he goes.

  “Well, I guess some of you ain’t gonna make it,” he says with a demented chuckle. “The ladies can come over here with us,” is coughed out while he raises the shotgun to his shoulder and aims carefully at my head. His partner is equally trained on Liam.

  I never thought about whether you would hear the gun that shot you. I guess you do, though, because I clearly heard the two shots ring out. They were separate and distinct. Perhaps my shooter had a coughing fit that delayed him. Or his friend didn’t know they were killing us and needed a second to catch up.

  The pain hasn’t set in yet, but somehow the hillbillies are slumping to the ground and I am still standing. There is complete silence. The girls aren’t screaming; there are no orders coming from anywhere. We are just standing in the middle of the road, frozen in total shock. The bodies of our would-be killers are a pathetic lump of dirty clothes and stink.

  In my head, I can remember the mist of blood that filled the air but I don’t remember actually seeing their heads explode. I once read about the physics involved with a head exploding due to a gunshot, but I can’t think of the formulas for describing the event I just witnessed. There is no question the men are dead and their bodies do not need to be inspected. There is no action for us to take. We stand like statues.

  “Everyone okay?” the voice from behind us is Dad’s.

  Chapter 18

  We’ve been walking for about an hour and the sun is climbing higher in the sky. Before we rolled out this morning, I estimated about twenty miles of visibility from the top of the tractor-trailer truck we spent the restless night on. In those twenty miles there was nothing, just vast emptiness.

  In addition to the scenic expanse, there was a completely gruesome sight. In the center median was a pile. At first glance, it looked like a pile of old clothes. I thought maybe someone had the idea to burn clothes of infected people to stop the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, the pile was made up of corpses. Virtually all of them were in uniform. Dad guessed it was National Guard. The sickening logistics of it all came to me while I stared. The pile was directly opposite one of the bulldozers. They must have backed trucks into the box, unloaded the bodies and then bulldozed them to the median. Then the truck got added to the roadblock.

  As Grace and Liam assembled breakfast, Dad and I inspected every vehicle in the roadblock. All of them had their batteries removed. The missing batteries were nowhere to be found. It seems like a very intelligent way to disable a car without causing permanent damage. In the last truck on the western side of the roadblock, we found some of our answers. A uniformed man with the clusters of a major sat in the cab of the truck with a laptop on the seat next to him. It had gone into sleep mode and still had 25 percent battery power. Knowing the military was here makes more sense than thinking those disgusting men put this together.

  On the computer desktop was an .avi file. Dad told me to play it and I was expecting him to ask me to step away, but he didn’t. The major’s face filled the screen, and it was clear he was near death. Very little color in his face and a constant cough made the “killer cold” easy to diagnose.
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  The uniformed bodies were not from the National Guard; they were regular army, part of a medical detachment. The major noted with regret that they had started a massive fire just east of the Mississippi river in the hopes that they could destroy the contagion and protect the western half of the continent. After setting the fire, there had been some traffic on the freeway, so he and his team had decided to set up the roadblock to inspect people before letting them through. Sick people were turned away; some were denied passage with force. No healthy people had approached the roadblock.

  His final comment was appropriately eerie. “I have not heard from central command in over a week. The few remaining members of my team have been sent west to rally in San Francisco. God help anyone who survives this.”

  While we walk, my thoughts take me back to those men that Dad murdered. I know it’s not a fair assessment of his actions, but it is the term that keeps coming back to me. Yes, they had guns trained on his children. Yes, they were trying to take his daughter. Yes, they looked and sounded like they were under the influence of something. But where was the diplomacy? Where was the conversation? Is he just going to kill everyone we have a conflict with from now on?

  My expectations of him are so high. It seems perfectly plausible to me that my Dad would have survived a 70 mile-per-hour head-on collision, silently exited the car and surveyed the area, then, upon seeing his children under the barrel of a gun, made his way around the assailants and disarmed them without a shot being fired. Once disarmed, he would have had a conversation with them about their actions, they would have apologized, and we would have two more people in our motley crew.

  Perhaps my brain is more damaged than I realized.

  I know that the average walking speed for a human is three miles per hour. If there is nothing for twenty miles, and we can maintain the average speed, we have a minimum of six hours of walking today, though we are likely in for a bigger chunk of the day than that. We are all sore from the crash, and between the fear that others would show up and the discomfort of sleeping outdoors on top of a tractor-trailer truck, it will be hard to average three miles per hour.

  I find it odd that a medical team from the Army would carry the stop sticks that were laid across the highway, but again, I don’t know much about military tactics. Perhaps the sticks were improvised and came from a police vehicle. But there was no police vehicle on-site and no indication of other law enforcement resources. So how did they get there?

  It is frighteningly possible that the next town we come to will have people in it. Maybe the local law enforcement or even a militia group thought that they could quarantine themselves. They might have added the stop sticks for good measure and retreated to their town. Any guards for a quarantined town likely have orders to shoot to kill. That means we would get the same amount of conversation Dad gave to the two men back there: none. We had better stay alert.

  “You guys better get used to walking,” Dad says out of the blue. “I’m not sure how long it’ll be before we get back to civilization.”

  “Can’t we ride a bike?” Liam asks.

  “Sure Liam, you can ride a bike,” Dad says curtly.

  I’m not sure why Dad’s mad at Liam. He has a really good point. Bikes are a great form of transportation. They go faster and require less energy than walking.

  “Um, Dad? Liam’s got a really good point.” I’m sticking up for my brother in what is effectively a useless argument. There are no bikes around.

  “Of course, he does Seamus. Why don’t you hop on the next bike you see and ride off?” comes frustrated reply.

  Liam is referencing the future and thinking about who knows what. Dad is thinking about the present but referencing the future. They are having two different conversations.

  It’s clear that Dad is on edge. I wonder if he is worried that there are guard posts with shoot-on-sight orders. Perhaps his tactical brain has come up with other, more likely scenarios that will result in our capture or death. Maybe he is injured more than any of us and is trying not to show it. Or maybe killing those two men last night is eating him up inside. I wish he would talk to us.

  But this is how Dad works. He never brings things up himself. He always waits for us to bring it up. I wonder why he does this. Is it some sort of parenting trick? Like if he waits for us to bring something up, that’s how he knows we are ready to discuss it and will listen to what he has to say? I guess you develop this approach through experience, but I really wish he would initiate a conversation for once.

  Maybe thinking about stuff like this means I’m growing up. If I’m growing up, I guess I have to start some conversations, too. If I sincerely believe that we would all benefit from talking about last night, I had better start talking.

  “Dad, are those the first people you’ve killed?” That didn’t come out right.

  Dead stop. Dad is staring at me in puzzlement. “Seriously, Seamus?”

  “That didn’t come out the way I wanted it to.” I’m defensive, apologetic and a little scared.

  “You’ve known me your whole life. Have I ever acted like someone who was comfortable with killing?” He’s more disappointed than angry.

  “Can we walk while we talk?” Sofie is unsure of how much she can push, but she’s right, we need to keep moving.

  “Do you somehow think that I enjoyed doing that last night? Do you think that I wanted to kill those men?” Dad is walking slightly ahead of the rest of us.

  “No,” we all murmur. But it seemed so easy from where we were standing. Everything seemed to happen so fast that there couldn’t have been much deliberation or thought.

  “Look, those men were both coughing. We all know that they would have died in the next day or two anyway. Why should I have let them put us all in danger of dying just so they could do drugs for another night?” Dad has a pretty clear justification for his actions.

  “We know you’re right,” Grace chimes in. “It’s just weird. Two weeks ago we got upset when someone posted a mean comment online. Now we can kill someone for threatening us?”

  “How did we get here!?” Sofie is looking at the sky and screaming. “This is insane. I want to wake up from this nightmare. I want it all to be over.”

  “I want it to be over too Sofie. The truth is, I feel terrible. I know it was warranted. I know those men would have died soon anyway. But who gave me the right, the power to make the decision I made?” His voice is hoarse and deeply emotional. “I don’t know how we got here or the best way for us to move on. I just know that we have to keep moving. We have to get to California. I hope none of us has to make another life-or-death decision. If that time does come again, I hope whoever it is has the strength to do the right thing for our family. Even if it will eat you up inside for the rest of your life.”

  We have each been given a license to kill. Family-first is the deciding factor in all future conflicts. It is unsettling, but not as much as the thought that it is necessary and likely to be in play more than once in the coming years.

  After some more walking in silence, we come to a road sign. Cheyenne, Wyoming, is twelve miles away. The next exit is four miles. At this point we have been on the move for almost six hours. Two more hours, and we will be able to sit down and eat, get a drink and rest.

  “When we get to California, I think I’m going to head out on my own.” Sofie is sharing her inner monologue. “I’d like to find a cottage on the beach where I can garden, and surf cast and live out my days reading classic novels.”

  “That sounds really beautiful. Can I come visit?” Grace is happy to venture off into fantasyland.

  “It does sound nice, but that might not be the safest approach to surviving the near future.” Dad wants us to make it through today.

  “I know, but I don’t think I’m cut out for rebuilding humanity or whatever the big picture is after we settle down.” She seems comfortable with her decision and is not sharing so that we can change her mind.

  “Well, after the mess we’v
e made of this cross-country trip, I don’t think any of us would have been nominated to rebuild humanity.” Liam is dead serious, but his comment is hysterical.

  After a good laugh that relaxes us all, Dad has the final word on the topic. “No one will force you to do anything, Sofie. I hope that for all of our sakes you will at least give us some time in California to figure out what the future might hold.”

  Chapter 19

  After ten hours of walking, it is quite possible that we are having hallucinations. On the rickety old swing set behind the truck stop, there is a little kid swinging, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He is not alarmed by our presence and, in fact, doesn’t even seem to notice us.

  Sadly, Dad has gripped his gun and made sure that there is a round in the chamber. Surely he can’t see this little person as a threat. Grace isn’t even aware of Dad’s actions; she wants to go help the child.

  “Grace” is all Dad says to stop her. He then leads us over behind a storage container and puts his backpack down.

  This is ridiculous. I’m about to speak my mind when Dad puts a finger to his lips.

  “If this is a trap, I want you all to run. Sofie and Seamus, pair up and stay together; Grace and Liam, pair up and stay together.” He’s whispering but is crystal clear. “Pairs should spread out. If we have to escape, meet up at the next mile marker down the highway. If we are not all there by daybreak, head out and keep going west.”

  Whoa, a trap. “Do you really think a four-year-old is going to set a trap for us?”

  “No, but he is the perfect bait.” Dad is anxiously looking around. “This is the first civilization since the roadblock. We have to assume they could be involved with that setup out on the highway.”

  This is what Sofie was talking about, fear of every human encounter. Even a four-year-old results in a drawn weapon and worst-case scenario plan. I don’t think I’m cut out for this either. I wonder if Sofie will let me share her cottage by the sea.