Shock Wave

by Keith Taylor

  SHOCK WAVE

  A POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL THRILLER

  KEITH TAYLOR

  Copyright © 2019 by Keith Taylor

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Printing, 2019

  CONTENTS

  FAREWELL, FRISCO

  THE FLOOR IS LAVA

  BOTTOM SHELF VODKA

  AX TO A GUNFIGHT

  WITH THAT WILD BEAST?

  GRAY'S ANATOMY

  AN ACT OF GOD

  BACTINE WON'T CUT IT

  WELCOME TO PINE BLUFF

  DID YOU SAY FRESNO?

  A THOUSAND LITTLE STEPS

  AS TALL AS HE'D EVER BE

  MOMMY WON'T WAKE UP

  DE NADA

  BROUGHAM AND GLENROSS

  A SMALL MERCY

  FIGHT OR FLIGHT

  FIGURE IT OUT, JACKASS

  TIP YOUR DRIVER

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  HEAT HAZE

  WE'VE GOT COMPANY

  HOLD STILL NOW

  WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES

  ONE NEW MESSAGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  FAREWELL, FRISCO

  YOU'RE LOOKING DOWN into a pool of gray, murky water.

  At its widest point the pool... Scratch that. Pool conjures up far too pleasant an image. It doesn’t belong here, where the air smells stale and the dim, washed-out light seems second-hand. This is a swamp. It’s a bleak, foul, waterlogged ditch the color of old dishwater, and at its widest point it reaches dozens of yards across before the milky liquid begins to seep into the mud at its fringes.

  You can see dim moonlight against the water’s surface, but the reflection isn’t clear. It’s rippled and disturbed by a gray chemical scum, an odious, stinking spume that clings to the surface and releases the stench of waste with every silently bursting bubble. Somewhere nearby you hear the sound of a broken sewer main emptying its effluent into the water.

  You pull back, and now you see that the ditch is far below ground level. You’re in a hole, a dark crater burrowed thirty yards deep into the earth, its shallow sides a mess of wet mud, shattered concrete and twisted steel.

  You rise up, relieved to leave the airless swamp behind, and you see that beyond the lip of the crater the ground has been scoured clear. Every building, road and blade of grass – everything that suggests there was once life – has been razed. All that remains is dust and death.

  In the dim moonlight you can see only a shadow of what once stood here. The foundations of buildings reduced to rubble. The ordered grid of city streets stripped of their asphalt. The burned, empty carcasses of cars, trams and trucks. Their remains exist only as a memorial.

  Now the air is thick with the billow of greasy smoke, choking and blinding. You recoil from the acrid, toxic bite in the back of your throat, and you rise higher to escape the dust that fills your lungs and burns your skin. A pall of it still clings close to the ground, floating like a mist, kicked up in the stale breeze and refusing to settle.

  You’re higher now, far above the ground, and here you gain a new perspective on the ravaged landscape stretching out around you. Now you see that the crater is at the center of it all. The scoured earth spreads out from there in all directions, a ragged circle a mile across, and it’s only at the edge of this barren patch that you begin to see buildings still standing, walls crumbling and windows blown out. There are fires raging out there, almost exhausted but still searching hungrily for fuel.

  Now you begin to recognize the city.

  This used to be San Francisco.

  To the west the green has been scorched away, but you can still make out the long, narrow rectangle of Golden Gate Park. Now it’s just an empty patch that stretches halfway across the city, ending abruptly at the debris-strewn beach. To the north you see Presidio, and beyond it the iconic majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge, scoured of its color and shrouded in a thick layer of ash, but somehow still standing.

  It’s now that you begin to notice the people. Bodies, mostly. Some of them are half buried in rubble, others simply collapsed on the ground, dying where they fell, but all of them are shrouded in the same gray, choking ash that even now falls from the sky. The smell of burned rubber and scorched brick dust is difficult to bear, but at least it hides the gag inducing odor of burned flesh.

  In amongst the corpses there are some people still moving. Just a few, most of them far from the crater where the buildings were better shielded. Through broken windows and collapsed walls you catch the occasional glimpse of flames and flashlights picked out against the darkness. The people huddle around their fires, stoking them with an almost religious fervor, as if they’ll somehow be safe just as long as they can keep the darkness at bay.

  If you move closer you might hear the weeping, the moans and screams of pain, the frantic, whispered prayers, but you’re not curious. You don’t want to hear the hope in their voices, because you know there is no hope for them. It would have been much kinder if they’d been taken quickly. Now they’re cursed to suffer before the end comes, and this end will be much slower and much, much more painful than the instant mercy of a nuclear blast. Soon enough these prayers for life will become desperate, pleading prayers for death.

  You turn away from them now, further from the crater and the burned out buildings, out towards the crumbling high rises to the east. There are more people here, some of them still on their feet, emerging from the basements and underground parking lots that protected them from the blast. Most of them are searching for lost loved ones or planning their escape, and their hope is even stronger. These people believe they might yet survive, but they’ll learn the truth soon enough. The poisoned ruins have already sealed their fate.

  As you move further east you pause for a moment, curious at the sight of a cluster of bodies around the charred remains of Union Square. Most of the dead in the city seem to have fallen alone, but this is the first group you’ve seen. Hundreds of them huddle close to each other in gutted stores, their bodies seemingly posed like mannequins in macabre window displays. There’s still movement here, but when you look closer you see it’s mostly rats. They were wise enough to seek shelter when the air turned to fire.

  Now you rise up and begin to leave the burned carcass of the city behind. There’s nothing but death back there. Across the water you see Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda, and on the far side of the bay it looks like life goes on. The streetlights still shine, and the buildings still stand.

  There are few people out there, though. Those who could leave fled long ago, but here and there a vehicle moves silently between inviting pools of light. You move towards them, eager to leave behind the stench of death and ensconce yourself in the comforting warmth of—

  Wait.

  Something catches your eye.

  Far below you see that the western half of the Bay Bridge has collapsed into the black water. The entire structure has vanished beneath the roiling waves, and all that’s left is a lip of shattered concrete reaching out just a few yards from the Yerba Buena tunnel. At the mouth of the tunnel you see something cut through the layer of ash that blankets the crumbling edge.

  Fresh footprints. Three pairs, two large and one small.

  Somebody actually survived. Against incredible odds three people somehow escaped the collapse of the bridge, lived through the blast and survived long enough to leave footprints in the fresh fallout that blankets the ground like virgin snow. You move in closer, your curiosity piqued, and as you approach the gaping tunnel mouth you see that the prints vanish into the darkness withi
n.

  A dim glow catches your eye deep within the tunnel. Curiosity pulls you forward, and as you move toward it you notice the outline of a steel door in the tunnel wall, framed by the green glow of an emergency exit sign. Beyond the door a staircase leads down, carved into the rock, its walls glowing blood red under emergency lights. You move down, deeper underground, and now you hear something you weren’t expecting.

  You hear somebody breathing. Panting. You hear the rustle of heavy clothing and the sound of boots on stone.

  You round a corner, and now you see her.

  It’s a woman, almost buried in a bright yellow work jacket made for someone a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier. She struggles up the red-lit staircase in boots three sizes too big, her long blond hair tucked beneath a hard hat, the collar of her jacket turned up to cover her neck.

  You move closer, and now you see she’s injured, exhausted, fighting through the pain as she forces her bruised body up the staircase. Closer still, and you see pallid skin. She looks so weak she could collapse at any moment.

  Even closer now, so close that you could reach out and touch her, and finally you see the determination in her red-rimmed eyes. You don’t know who she is, but you can see that some powerful force is driving her, something beyond sight that keeps her putting one foot in front of the other despite the pain. Some reason to fight for survival that goes beyond self preservation.

  You can see in her eyes that she’s a mother.

  ΅

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE FLOOR IS LAVA

  KAREN STARED UP at the final dozen steps, her eyes fixed on the door at the top with the determination of a climber setting his sights on a mountain peak. She gripped the handrail in both hands like a taut rope, hauling herself up the dimly lit shaft on trembling legs.

  Her body was screaming out for rest. Her bruised ribs stabbed at her chest with each quick, shallow breath, but still she forced herself to climb. There was no time to spare. She couldn’t allow herself the luxury of catching her breath while her daughter breathed poisoned air in the control room far below.

  The last few steps seemed to stretch out above her for an eternity. In her mind they grew to the height of towering cliffs, looming over her, impossible to scale, but somehow she summoned the strength to drag herself to the top. When her hands finally touched the cold steel of the door she let out a relieved laugh, echoing eerily down the stairwell, then quickly silenced herself as she raised her radio to her lips.

  “Doc,” she whispered, fearful of her voice carrying to the other side, “do you see anybody out there?”

  She gnawed nervously on a nail as she waited for his reply, then pulled her hand from her mouth with a look of disgust when she realized what she was doing. Her nails were gray, packed with the ground in dirt she hadn’t been able to wash away in the bathroom. There was no way of knowing if it was radioactive.

  “Doc,” she whispered again, harshly, picking at the dirt with a thumbnail. “Are you reading me?”

  When the reply finally came through Ramos’ voice crackled with interference, the signal struggling to make it through the yards of solid rock that separated her from the control room.

  “Hang on a sec,” he replied. “I can barely hear you. I’m panning the camera around.”

  For a long moment Karen stood staring at the door in front of her, worrying about what she’d find on the other side. In her imagination there were all kinds of threats waiting for her out there, from raging fires to deadly fallout, but the worst danger she could imagine was to find hundreds of people – sick, panicked and dangerous – eager to flood down the staircase to join Emily in their shelter. Whatever happened she couldn’t let anyone put her daughter at risk.

  Eventually Ramos came back, his voice faint and hard to make out.

  “I can’t see any movement from here. No promises, but it looks to me like you have a clear run all the way to the fans.”

  Karen sighed with relief. She didn’t want any complications. On the other side of that door she knew she’d be fully exposed to the radiation raining down from the sky above the city. She knew she’d have to be quick if she wanted to make it back to Emily alive, and the last thing she needed was to stop for a chat with anyone unfortunate enough to still be out there. She didn’t want to have to look them in the eye, knowing they’d already been handed a death sentence.

  She took a deep breath and tugged her high visibility jacket tight around her waist.

  “I’m going in,” she whispered into the radio, leaning a shoulder against the heavy steel door. “Warn me if you see anyone on the cameras.”

  As the door swung open the acrid stink of exhaust fumes hit her right away, catching in the back of her throat and sending her staggering back into the stairwell. It was so thick it was almost a solid wall down at the bottom of the lower deck, and it was easy to see why. There were hundreds of cars within sight. As far as Karen could see they were all abandoned, but the drivers hadn’t thought to kill their engines before they’d fled, and now the cars sat pumping out fumes that overwhelmed the ventilation fans. The smoke coiled and gathered like an eerie fog beneath the dim emergency lights glowing from the ceiling.

  Karen tugged her collar over her mouth, trying to block out the smell and keep as much of her skin as possible protected from the ash she could see drifting in the air along with the exhaust, but she knew it was a futile gesture. There was no escaping the fumes, and Ramos had already explained over the radio as she climbed that it wasn’t the ash she had to worry about. That was just the most visible danger, formed from the heaviest elements and first to fall from the sky.

  By now the air itself was radioactive. Now that the ground had been blanketed by fallout it would have been picked up by the wind and scattered into particles far too small to see. It would have reached every inch of the tunnel, channeled through by natural air currents and the enormous fans designed to suck in air from the west and push it out the east.

  By now the concrete walls of the tunnel, the steel door beside her and even the abandoned vehicles ahead would be buzzing with radiation, all of them shrouded in a fine coating of radioactive dust. She was entering a death zone. Nothing short of a radiation suit would keep her safe out here.

  She stepped nervously out into the tunnel, hopping down to the road from the elevated lip of the door, and right away she could see motes of dust and wisps of smoke dancing in headlights. There was no way of knowing whether it was relatively harmless exhaust or deadly fallout, but it didn’t matter. There was no escaping it. With every breath she’d be inhaling radioactive particles, and with every second she spent out here in the open she’d be taking one step closer to an excruciating death.

  She pushed the door closed behind her, sealing off the staircase from the poisoned air now filling her lungs, and turned east in the direction of Oakland.

  “Doc, do you see me on screen?” Karen’s voice came out strained and quiet as she tried to limit her breathing.

  “Yeah, I see you,” came the broken reply. “You’re on camera 21.”

  “OK, which way should I walk?” She knew the ventilation fans were close to camera 23, but she had no idea which direction they were in, and she knew she didn’t have the time to wander aimlessly through the tunnel until she found them.

  The radio crackled again, the signal even weaker now she was on the wrong side of the door. “Can you give me a wave? High as you can reach. I’ll look for you on 20 and 22.”

  Karen jumped and raised an arm towards the ceiling, the other clinging to the radio and the collar of her jacket. “Can you see me now, Doc?”

  “No, all I can see is cars from here,” Ramos replied, his voice almost silent now. “Can you get to higher ground? Maybe climb up on one of the cars?”

  Karen cursed under her breath. She couldn’t afford this delay. She could already feel the dust and grime settling on her skin, and in her head she could almost hear the frantic clicking of a Geiger counter warning of the rad
iation tearing through her body, ripping her DNA to shreds.

  She turned to an old Cadillac sedan beside her, its engine still running, the exhaust belching out choking blue smoke, and as she tugged her sleeves over her bare hands and hoisted herself up onto the trunk a vivid memory came to her. She remembered playing as a child, hopping from her mom’s couch to the armchair imagining that the floor was a creeping river of lava. She remembered the fake terror, squealing with mock pain as she stumbled from an armrest and touched the carpet.

  This time it was real. This time, she thought with a fearful shiver, everything she touched would burn her.

  She pulled herself to her feet on the trunk of the car, carefully brushing the ash from her knees before raising her arms high, waving above her head. After a long, tense silence the radio crackled.

  “OK, I’ve got you,” said Ramos. “I see you facing away from me on camera 22. You need to turn around and head maybe a hundred yards west. The junction box is on the south wall. Got it?”

  “Got it. Thanks, Doc.” She dropped the radio back into the breast pocket of the jacket and hopped back down to the road. She barely had the energy to walk, but from somewhere deep down she dredged the strength to force herself into a clumsy jog in the narrow path between the cars. A hundred yards there and a hundred back, with maybe a couple of minutes to shut off the power to the fans.

  That might be survivable, so long as she moved quickly.

  The doc had explained the risks to her over the radio as she’d climbed the stairs. Within a half hour of the blast the worst of the fallout would already have returned to earth this close to ground zero, and they’d only been exposed to it for a couple of minutes before they’d reached shelter. Now the secret to survival was simply to stay sealed off from the outside world until the radiation decayed to relatively safe levels, and the way the Doc had described it made it sound as if it would be fairly easy, so long as they were smart about it.