"But," argued Vern, "everyone said—even NASA—that it wasn't supposed to be so bad."
"You just said the press lies about everything, what makes you think NASA told the truth?"
"Oh come on, Paulie," argued the first voice as Jay stepped down to the street. "You seen any of them hacker logos? They got everything all at once yesterday. Shut down the entire gov'ment I heard."
"Hackers?" asked Vern. "Good night. You think hackers caused all them lights Paulie—what about you, Hal, you been pretty quiet. Whatcha think?"
Jay ignored the indignant argument and hobbled down the street, pausing at the corner to catch his breath and readjust to the biting cold. Above, the aurora had dimmed to a sullen green glow in the north. The magnetosphere was quickly repairing itself in the aftermath of the solar bombardment days earlier. For the first time in what felt like a year, Jay looked up and saw the actual stars, like diamonds scattered across black velvet, instead of wriggling snakes of pastel light.
A muttered curse drifted to his ears on the wind. He squinted in the darkness to see up the street. Several cars had been parked along the snow-covered sidewalk in front of darkened houses. Two shadows hovered near the closest one.
Jay hurried over and found Logan and Shelly busy breaking into a Honda Fit. “What the hell are you doing?” he hissed.
Logan swore and jumped up, his fists balled. Shelly pulled open the door and climbed in.
“Back off man, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Just kick his ass and get in the car!” Shelly whispered from inside. She reached out and pulled their bags into the front seat with her. “Come on!”
Logan’s eyes twinkled in the starlight. The faint green tint to his skin made him look ill. He was tall enough, but even in Jay’s injured and weakened state, Logan didn’t present all that threatening a posture.
“I don’t want to fight you,” he said after a moment, watching his words turn to vapor in the space between them.
“What?” asked Logan, dropping his guard a fraction.
“He’s gonna turn you in! Come on!” Shelly cried.
“I don’t care what you’re running from. I want a car.”
“Well you can damn well go get your own!” Shelly fired back.
Jay ignored her. “You know how to hot-wire this thing?”
Logan actually grinned. “Hot-wire? Man, how old are you? Nobody hot-wires anything any more. You strip the column.”
“How do you know how to do that?” Jay asked, wondering what stripping the column entailed.
Logan cleared his throat. “I had a roommate that uh…he wasn’t the best person in the world but he knew…things.”
“Mmmphmm,” Jay muttered. “So can you start that thing or what?”
Logan dropped his fists and looked at the car. Shelly glared at him. “Yeah, I can start it—easy. You just need to peel back the steering column, you know, the plastic part on just about every car…”
“What are you doing?” whined Shelly. “What if he’s a cop?”
“…and shove a metal shank in there—you just have to file it to the right shape.”
“That’s it?” asked Jay, incredulous.
“Well, you gotta do it the right way…it’s a skill, though, right?”
“Jesus Christ,” moaned Shelly from inside the car. “I don’t believe this.”
“Look, mister, what do you want from us?” asked Logan.
“I need a car.”
Logan shushed Shelly as she started to complain again. He turned back to Jay. “What’s in it for us?”
“I’ll share my supplies—”
“We have enough, thank you very much,” she snapped.
“And I won’t use my radio to call the cops.”
“I told you!” she hissed. “God damn it! We don’t have time for this shit.”
Logan frowned. “You have a working radio?”
“That's right.”
He glanced over Jay’s shoulder at the church. “We don’t have time to open another one. The smokers are watching us.”
Jay turned to look. Cigarette tips glowed orange in the darkness. “So what do we do?” he asked.
Logan smiled, his teeth flashing in the dark. “Let’s go steal another car.”
CHAPTER 9
LEAH RUBBED SWEATY PALMS on her jeans, trying to listen over the pounding of her heart and the sound of people ransacking the first floor. The screams and shouts grew louder and louder as the minutes passed. Frustrated looters flung curses and threats up the stairwells at either end of the building.
She gripped the broken leg of a desk in her hands, taking a little comfort in the stout piece of oak. Leah worried over her reaction when the first looters broke through. Could she swing it in self-defense? Could she really hit someone with it?
Instead of discouraging them, finding blocked stairwells only seemed to spur the looters to redouble their efforts to reach the upper floors. After 30 minutes, they were spitting mad.
That realization rippled through the gathered students on her side of the building like a wave crashing on the beach. Several of the girls standing near the common room burst into choking tears, huddled together for support. The grim faces on the older boys gave her hope they might see things through to the end, but who knew?
Dad, where are you? Why haven't you come to get me yet? Leah wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball, hide in a dark corner somewhere, and cry.
A crash from the stairwell made her flinch, and she dropped her stave to clatter on the linoleum floor at her feet. She stooped slowly and picked it up with trembling hands, hoping to hear the sound of the looters giving up their insane quest.
"You hear that, motherfuckers? Anyone we find up there is going to suffer for this bullshit! All we wanted was your stuff…"
"Yeah, we need all the food and water you got,” said a second voice. “We know you got some!"
"Why won't they just leave us alone?" muttered a girl behind Leah.
"We didn't do anything to anybody…" agreed another.
"Shut up," hissed one of the boys. "If they don't hear us, maybe they’ll think we left…"
Leah looked sideways at the student next to her. "Really? You think they’ll believe that we left after we filled the stairwells?"
The boy stuttered his response, finally turning away from Leah to pace the halls with his own broken piece of furniture.
"Hey, we're gonna get through this," said Hunter. "It's like, fate or something, right?"
"Fate? What the hell are you talking about?" snapped Leah. "There's a bunch of assholes downstairs going around campus taking what everybody else has. Most people out there probably don't have half what we have—they won’t leave us alone."
Hunter nodded sagely in the dim light. "Don't I know it. It's like the blind raging against the burning of the night or some shit, you know? It's all like, metaphysical."
Leah shook her head. "You’re high."
"Most righteously, madame. You think I'd be standing here like this if I wasn't?” He laughed. “I don't know how y’all are doing it. I’d be pissing my pants if I wasn't high as a kite right now, you know? I've never been so scared," he mumbled. "I'm just glad you're here to tell us what to do."
Me? I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
Leah heard soft footfalls behind her and turned. Thom's runner stopped in front of her—she half-expected him to salute.
"They backed away. There's nobody down there makin’ any noise at all. Thom says he thinks they might be heading to your side."
When the hell did me and Thom become the leaders in this shit show?
Leah nodded. "Okay……" she stalled, hoping someone else would speak before she had to admit she had no clue what to do.
She was a physics student on her way to an astronomy degree. None of the ROTC guys stayed behind—they had left on some weekend adventure hike or something. It figured; the one time they would have good for something other than waking everyone in the
dorm at 4am for their daily run across campus and they were AWOL.
"Okay. I am…” Leah began. She raised her hands. “Look—we’ll send word if they hit down here. I guess we need to combine our forces or something? Go see what Thom thinks, okay?"
"Okay," whispered the runner who turned and disappeared down the hallway.
"You sure you’ve never done this before?" asked Aaron from the shadows.
Leah caught herself grinning at the smile in his voice. "Positive. This is the scariest damn thing I've ever done.”
"Listen!" someone closer to the fire door hissed. "They're really banging like hell on something down there."
Leah opened her mouth to comment on the increased noise level when a tremendous crash reverberated through the stairwell. Shouts of triumph immediately followed what she assumed was the collapse of the barricade on the second floor.
Hoots and shouts rumbled along the floor beneath them to the sound of feet pounding up steps. She tried to turn and warn the others but found her throat too dry.
"Quick! Go tell Thom they broke through the first door! We're gonna need help," Aaron told one of the whimpering girls.
One of the guys ran off instead, screaming at the top of his lungs for help.
The fire door slammed open and a man carrying a flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other stepped through the door with a wicked grin on his face. “You shouldn't have made that so hard…”
Faster than Leah could believe, Aaron stepped forward and swung his stave like a baseball bat, catching the intruder in the stomach. The man went down with a surprised look on his face and whoosh of air as the breath left his lungs. He dropped his flashlight and knife on the way to the floor.
Spurred into action by Aaron’s quick strike, Leah lunged forward and helped throw the gasping man back in the stairwell. They slammed the fire door shut, muffling the surprised shouts from the other side.
The door shuddered behind them as someone slammed into it again and again. Leah bounced off and then put her weight back against the door next to Aaron.
"Well, they know we're here," she said over the din.
Angry curses and shouts hammered at the door almost as fast as the fists and feet that attempted to break it from its hinges. "We're gonna kill you all!” a deep voice warned from the other side.
Thom and six or seven of his group rounded the corner and added to the cluster of students gripping pieces of wood in little clusters.
"How do you want to do this?" Thom gasped.
Me?
In a flash, Leah saw the solution to their problem as returned, simple as a black hole. Light, matter, and even time falls onto the surface of a black hole with the inexorable pull of gravity. But only so much of it can collapse into the event horizon at once. In certain cases, when too much hits at once, the singularity rejects immense amounts of energy as radiation. The huge jets of gas spewing out of some of these black holes at relativistic speeds gave rise to the birth of quasars. An astronomical choke point.
A sudden thought occurred to Leah. They had a natural choke point. Although there must have been at least three or four men in the stairwell on the other side of the door, only one could come through at a time.
“What do we do now?” asked Hunter.
"We let them in,” she hissed. "They can only come through the door one at a time. One comes in and we smash him and shove him back. There's like 20 of us out here, right?"
"Eighteen by my count," Thom said. "But I like the idea. Only about four or five of us can fit up front at once. That means for every one that comes through, we got five that can fight. When they get tired, we switch out," he muttered.
"You're a freaking tactical genius, Leah," grunted Aaron as he struggled against the pounding door. “You play WoW?”
“I have no idea what I'm doing—wait, what?”
"Never mind—follow my lead, we’ll let one in and slam the door. Ready?" asked Aaron.
Leah motioned for several other students to come over and join her and Aaron just to the side of the door. When Aaron nodded, she jumped back and the fire escape door flung open. The looter on the other side stumbled forward against the unexpected loss of counter pressure.
Thom and the first wave of defenders were on him in a flash, swinging staves and chunks of wood like baseball bats. Before the attacker’s comrades could rally behind him, he went down under a flurry of attacks and fell straight back into the arms of his fellow thugs.
"Now!" Thom shouted, throwing his arms out to block his group from moving forward.
Leah and Aaron screamed along with the other reserve students and smashed into the fire door, slamming it shut.
The shouts from the other side of the door confirmed the tactic had worked. The door immediately shuddered again under the renewed onslaught of the angry invaders.
"They're not getting the message fast enough," Aaron observed.
"What do you have in mind?" asked Thom as he bent over to catch his breath. "Hey guys, get ready. I think we can handle one more, then we're gonna need to take a break."
"Anybody catch how many were in the stairwell?" asked one of the guys next to Thom.
"I did, but no one will believe me," muttered Hunter, busy making an exaggerated swing of his chair leg as if he sallied forth with a sword.
"What if the next one has a gun?" whispered Leah, as she struggled against the bucking door.
Aaron looked down and saw the first attacker's knife laying on the floor. "Then we show them we mean business."
He kicked the flashlight over to Thom. "Here, shine this in their eyes and see if you can blind them when they come through."
"Is that really going to work?" asked Thom.
"How the hell should I know? I've never done this before!"
Leah swallowed. "I need someone else to grab that knife."
"What…what for?" asked one of the others from the darkness. "You want us to stab them?"
"No way, man—I'm no killer," said Hunter. Several voices agreed with him.
Her frustration mounting, Leah lashed out at all of them. "What the hell is wrong with you all? They're on the other side of this door threatening to kill us! You saw what they did to the dorm across the street. These guys may even be the same ones even setting fires around campus or part of that riot at the dining hall!"
"Probably doesn't mean they were," someone snapped back.
"Does it fucking matter? They broke into our building! They're trying to steal what food and water we have left." The door lurched open a crack and Leah slammed her shoulder back against the metal. She tossed the hair out of her eyes with an angry jerk of her head.
"Don't you guys realize if they take our food and water we're going to starve? We may as well let them shoot us right now be done with it!"
"Look, beating them back with sticks and stuff is one thing," said one of the girls. "But the cops are gonna show up sooner or later, right? We don't want to be charged with murder."
"It's not murder if it's self-defense!" snarled Leah. When no one moved, she bent and scooped up the knife. "Fine, I'll do it myself!"
Thom shouted a warning, but it was too late. The pressure on the other side of the door was too much for Aaron to handle by himself and the door swung open. A heavyset man staggered through the doorway, shouting.
Someone yelled gun, then the hallway lit up with a blinding light. She screamed at the deafening explosion and lashed out with the knife.
Something heavy hit her foot, and the door slammed shut. Her ears ringing from the sound of the gunshot, Leah staggered back and dropped the knife as she bumped into the far wall. She went to flip some stray hair out of her eyes and felt wetness on her forehead. The world around her devolved into a scene of shifting shadows as the defending students raced back and forth between the door and the hallway.
In the dim light, Leah looked down at her hand and saw it was covered with something dark and wet.
Oh my God, I stabbed that man!
&nbs
p; As her hearing returned, she realized the defending students didn’t scream in terror but cheered in victory. Leah sagged against the concrete cinderblock wall and slumped to the ground, resting her head between her knees. Her entire body shook as an adrenaline rush left her shaking.
Thom called out her name once, twice—three times—before he finally pushed his way through the crowd and dropped to the floor next to her. A strong hand gripped her shoulder.
"Leah? Are you okay? Were you hit?"
It was only then that she heard the wailing from the other side of the hallway. "No, but…and…no…"
Before she could say anything else, Thom enveloped her in a bear hug.
The smell of his stale sweat and dirty clothes overpowered the metallic smell of blood on her hands and for a moment she closed her eyes and succumbed to the warmth of his embrace.
"They're falling back—you did it," he whispered into her hair.
As relief washed over her, a new sensation gurgled up from Leah's stomach. "We won?"
Thom held her in his embrace a moment longer and she felt the wetness of his tears drip on her neck. "We did it!"
Leah promptly threw up all over him. The two of them—now liberally covered with vomit—laughed.
"Holy shit, did you see the look on that guy's face when Leah nailed him with that knife?" Hunter laughed as one of the girls hugged him tight. "That was fucking badass, man!"
Leah closed her eyes and gently disentangled herself from Thom. She wiped her face with the back of her right hand, clinching her teeth against the smell of blood on her left.
"So…now what do we do?" asked Thom. He sat back on his heels and looked over a shoulder. "Aaron—you hear anything?"
"Hang on," Aaron said. He picked up the knife Leah discarded and grabbed the flashlight from another student. "I'll check it out." As soon as the fire escape door closed behind him, the celebration the in the hallway died.
More than one student braced themselves when they heard someone coming back up the stairs a few minutes later. Leah released the breath she'd been holding and smiled when the door opened.
Solar Storm: Season 1 [Aftermath Episodes 1-5] Page 24