Long Haul Home Collection (A Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller): Series Books 1-3

by Dana Fraser

  Regrettably, his sidearm and any knife that had more utility than a nail file remained stateside. The Belgian authorities preferred their citizens and visitors defenseless despite the recent body counts of innocent civilians.

  Hearing the bolt slide on the suite's exterior door, he spun to find Mara entering the outer room empty handed. Her gaze settled on the bed behind him where Thomas had flung open his luggage to rearrange the contents.

  "What is going on?" Her voice went shrill, red flooding her face to match the color of the dress she hadn't changed out of. "We have a presentation to give in less than three hours, not to mention tomorrow's schedule!"

  "I'm going home." He turned toward the luggage as an airline representative finally took him off hold.

  "Yes, I need a flight today from—"

  The phone flew out of his hand as Mara brought her closed fist down on his forearm. Turning a narrow gaze on the woman, he bent to retrieve the device.

  She kicked it under the bed.

  "Two hours from now, you and your damned distinguished service cross are going to be standing in front of that window!" Her arm shot out, one bony, red-tipped finger pointing at the picture window with its view of St. Michael.

  Forcing his temper down, he smiled at Mara, which only served to bring more color to her cheeks. He abandoned the idea of insisting she return to the States. At present, the beta on the threat assessment app was only running North American data. Quite possibly, she would be safer staying in Belgium.

  He, however, didn't have a choice.

  He was going home.

  Waking his computer from sleep mode, he pointed at the screen, his heart sinking at the sight. All but a few portions of the United States were shaded at least yellow. The Gulf Coast states were predominately dyed red.

  "You saw this map when you were confirming it was the beta version."

  She responded with an eye roll and a folding of her arms across her chest.

  "You don't believe in the application?"

  "I believe in my stock options, which you're pissing away right now."

  He nodded, his smile thinning to a calm, grim line. "Then stay and make the pitch. Tell them whatever lie you think necessary as to why I left."

  Dipping down, he fished his phone from under the bed and hit re-dial for the airline's ticket desk.

  "Why?" she sputtered.

  "Maybe I'm the only one, but I believe in what we built." Bringing the phone up to his ear, he poked his chin at the application's display. "And it says my family needs me."

  Chapter One

 

  Purple twilight settled over the outskirts of Chicago. Sitting in the passenger seat of a 2007 Peterbilt 379, Cash Bishop felt the big rig drift left. He looked over to find the driver, Chuck Yardley, pressing a cheek against the window as he checked out the "seat covers" on a passing Jeep filled with young women, their Friday night whooping and hollering audible over the Caterpillar engine with its galloping 475 horsepower.

  One of the women must have shown Yardley a little love because the old man blew his horn long and hard.

  "Nice," Yardley smirked, settling back into his seat. "Hardly see carpet on the covers any more. Me, I like women with a thick bush."

  Head angling slightly in Cash's direction, Yardley raised an inquisitive brow.

  Cash shrugged. "Can't say I've thought about it."

  Even if he had, he wouldn't discuss his preferences with Yardley. That sort of casual, leering conversation among males dishonored the act, or so he believed. Thankfully, his time as a passenger in the old man's truck had been short and was almost over. Traffic was unusually light for a Friday evening and they were maybe twenty minutes from the Rosewood terminal, where Yardley had agreed to drop him.

  With the light almost gone, Cash closed the small notepad he'd been diagramming in and tucked it into a side cargo pocket on his pants, along with a mechanical pencil. With the constant drift of the rig while Yardley ogled women in passing vehicles, Cash hadn't made much progress figuring out exactly where he would place the new solar panels he had ordered before heading out on his latest run.

  Yardley poked his right elbow in the direction of the disappearing notepad. "Never knew a trucker who was a homesteader. Kind of the opposite of being a trucker, if you want my opinion.”

  Yardley laughed, his hand leaving the steering wheel to rub absently at his protruding gut. "Heck, my daddy was a trucker and he had three wives — all at the same time! One on the east coast, one on the west and one smack in the middle. Never spent more than a few days with each."

  "Seems like a lot of work," Cash said, his gaze looking ahead to the overhead sign announcing how many miles remained until the I-55 exchange. Seeing it was eight miles, he restrained a sigh. That was eight to reach I-55, then another eight to the terminal.

  He'd survived more than seven years in Afghanistan and Iraq, he figured he could make it through sixteen more miles with the old man despite the constant assault on Cash’s ears and nose.

  With a side glance, he inspected the trucker and his rig, his mind searching for that one piece of the Yardley puzzle that would finally reveal what was off about the man.

  After years of following the Army’s uniform standards, Cash knew part of his problem with Yardley was the man’s overall slovenly appearance. It wasn’t the excess weight. There were plenty of truckers hauling that kind of load that Cash didn’t mind keeping company with.

  Stains layered the man’s dark clothes, some of the spots fresh and glistening when Cash had climbed up into the truck. Yardley’s nails were filthy. The blackish red crust built up under them had kept Cash looking for the first half hour with great longing at the travel tote behind the driver’s seat filled with Lysol wipes and a bottle of bleach.

  That was the weirdest part, Cash realized. The driver was a slob, but his mattress was wrapped in plastic and the extended sleeper cab had been saturated with cleaning fluids, their noxious fumes blocking out any other odors and making Cash lightheaded.

  "They was all just rest stops for my daddy,” Yardley blathered on. "If you know what I mean.”

  Another promising vehicle must have been approaching alongside because the rig drifted left again. Yardley's body lifted an inch off the seat as he contorted his neck and looked down.

  "Pants," he muttered, as if the piece of clothing was an object to be scorned. He shook his head, his top lip curling disdainfully. "Back when my daddy was crossing the country once a week, women mostly wore skirts."

  "They wore skirts on the wagon trails, as I recall,” Cash joked, figuring Yardley must be in his mid sixties at least, which would have placed his father among the very first crop of cross-country truck drivers.

  He'd encountered Chuck a couple different times, enough to know him by sight and for Yardley to have heard a thing or two about Cash from some of the Rosewood drivers that traveled similar routes. Cash was easy to spot in the truck stops, his attention focused either on a larger version of the pocket journal or his food instead of the waitresses. He was even easier to spot in the terminal while switching trucks because of how little gear he carried job to job. Most drivers kept their trucks loaded with creature comforts and things to entertain them during down time. For those drivers, switching rigs took at least three trips.

  Cash never took more than he could carry on his own in an extra-large backpack, its contents designed to get him home even if society and nature fought him every step of the way.

  "How long you been doing that?" Yardley asked after a few more miles had passed.

  "Born on a farm," Cash answered before twisting the truth just a bit. "So most of my life, you could say."

  He didn't like giving people the whole story, like how his father had lost the farm and died a few years later when Cash and his sister were still in school. That just got him to thinking how his widowed mother had spent so many years working double shifts at the hospital to keep Cash and his sister housed and fed, her dreams of
sending them both off to college destroyed when she lost her nursing license. Those were just two of the tribulations that had plagued the Bishop family after his dad died.

  "So it's not because you're worried about EMPs or zombies?" Yardley asked with the same sort of disdain he had dismissed women wearing pants.

  Shaking his head, Cash laughed. "World's already overrun with zombies, haven't you noticed?"

  "Zombies and lot lizards," Yardley agreed as he signaled a lane change, the big rig pointed at the ramp for I-55.

  Cash nodded politely through another stomach churning eight minutes of Yardley telling him about the last "lot lizard" he'd let into his rig. The woman had apparently expected forty dollars for her company, which was ten dollars less than Cash had paid the old man for the ride from Madison to Chicago after his own rig broke down.

  "Believe me," Yardley said, pulling to a stop on the side of the street where other rigs were waiting to turn into the lot for Rosewood National Transport. "She weren't no looker."

  "Guess inflation's hitting everything," Cash said, the first genuine smile since Madison lighting his face as he escaped the rig and its driver with a hop down to the sidewalk.

  Reaching into the truck, he hauled out his backpack, his arms bulging from the seventy pounds it held.

  "I bet you could fit that last lot lizard in there," Yardley laughed.

  Cash nodded absently as he adjusted the backpack's frame to his body. Empty, the equipment weighed six pounds and had a ninety-five liter capacity, making it almost six thousand cubic inches without counting the shovel pocket, bottle holder, and outside mesh pockets.

  Despite the weight on his back and the line of trucks ahead of them starting to move, Cash stepped onto the truck's side rail, angled his body and extended his right hand across the passenger seat.

  "Thanks for the ride, I really appreciate it."

  "Nice to have company that pays me," Yardley laughed as he shook Cash's hand. "See you around, kid."

  Cash responded with a two-fingered scout's salute, his mouth flattening into a neutral line as he stepped down. Walking toward the gate, he stopped and looked back in time to see Yardley pulling out.

  He was pretty certain he would never see the man again.

  Easing into the left turn lane, Chuck Yardley reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the money the kid had given him. Fingering the two twenties and the ten, he licked at thick lips and grinned.

  Fifty bucks.

  He knew just the stop down the road where that would get himself a nice juicy steak and half an hour with a certain lot lizard who wouldn't charge him extra when he made her bleed.

  Chapter Two

 

  Entering the dispatch area of the Rosewood terminal, Cash slid his pack off and leaned it against the wall before approaching the desk of Al Wooster, Rosewood's Chicago dispatcher and resident despot.

  Without acknowledging Cash's arrival, Wooster scratched his pencil along a piece of paper attached to a clipboard. Cash waited, silent and weary of Wooster's constant game playing. The man knew someone was standing in front of his desk, and he knew who that person was. He also had made it clear on at least a dozen occasions that he didn't like Cash.

  Waiting for the dispatcher to break down and look up, Cash grinned at the two minute mark. Apparently, Wooster was trying to set some kind of passive-aggressive record.

  Just shy of three minutes, Wooster slammed the clipboard against his desk and glared upward, his chin continuing to point down like an obstinate bull — one that had lost its horns a long time ago.

  "Heard you sheared an axle outside of Madison," Wooster said, the words laced with disdain and accusation. "Lost your tandems, I heard.”

  Cash shrugged. The fault wasn't his. The rig was one of the oldest in Rosewood's fleet. He'd done a full inspection before leaving the terminal. The mechanic in Madison said the danger wouldn't have been visible during inspection. The trucking company was lucky the accident had happened late at night or else there would have been enough traffic around that someone might have died. As it was, Cash had maintained control of the rig and no one was hurt.

  His wallet and his schedule were starting to bleed, however. The repairs would take at least five days. Rosewood was sending a replacement truck and driver to pick up the load, leaving Cash to pay his way home or pick up another rig and load at the terminal. As it was, he had been forced to make his own way to Chicago. With the convoluted scheduling of the passenger bus lines, he had rolled the dice and found Chuck at the diner outside Madison.

  "Need a ride south," Cash told the dispatcher, his tone affecting a casual note he didn't feel.

  "Due south," he added before Wooster could name a destination the man knew would be unacceptable.

  Huffing, Wooster bounced his thick fingers against the keyboard, his gaze locked on the computer's display and his top lip curling. Accenting the man’s annoyance, two bright red dots materialized on his otherwise pallid cheeks.

  Knowing Wooster would enter him for a load but wait until the last possible minute to confirm the job, Cash hooked his forearms through the straps on his pack and carried it across the large open room to where he could hear the television playing.

  Settling into a chair, he pulled his charger out and plugged it into the nearby socket, then checked his phone one last time before connecting it to the charger.

  No service.

  His chest tightened. He hadn't been able to complete a call all day and had only gotten one text message out to his sister in Tennessee, letting her know he would be finding the fastest route home. He had no idea if she had received the text. Chatter over the CB radios suggested that his cellular service having problems wasn't an isolated event.

  All through Wisconsin and into Chicago, the truckers had been complaining about not getting any signal.

  Looking at the news broadcast on television, Cash read the bottom strip with its scrolling headlines.

  "Hey, Wooster," he called, putting aside his distaste for the man in order to gain any additional information from the hours Wooster spent parked on his ass with the television running. "The news is saying cell phones are out everywhere. Are the phone lines working here?”

  Rolling his eyes, Wooster answered by reaching behind his computer and bouncing the thin wire that fed into its backside.

  Technically, the man was fingering an ethernet wire, one that Cash knew ran to a cable router. So the sarcastic gesture wasn't an answer at all. With a snort, he stood and headed toward Wooster's desk. Pausing in the abuse of his keyboard, Wooster grabbed a Sharpie from his penholder and furiously scribbled on a piece of paper.

  Right before Cash reached the landline on Wooster's desk, the man slapped the piece of paper on top of the phone.

  EMERGENCY USE ONLY!!!

  Cash flicked his gaze in Wooster's direction, the coldness in his eyes telling the dispatcher he was a coward.

  Hearing the weather report come on the television, Cash returned to the waiting area.

  Hurricane Otto was eating up the coastline between New Orleans and the Mobile-Pensacola area. The scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen had changed to something about a security breach at Hoover Dam.

  The coverage was last night's news, but with a fresh twist. Other dams had been taken offline during the day while inspectors made sure there were no similar breaches. That left the entire western United States scrambling for electricity.

  Cash chewed at his bottom lip as he found the remote and switched to one of the twenty-four hour news channels.

  "No changing channels," Wooster griped from behind the false safety of his desk. "You know the rules."

  Moving closer to the television, Cash ignored the man. He surfed through the feed looking for more than just weather and coverage of both the power and cell service outages — some small gleaning that the news was more than a convergence of bad coincidences and one intentional act of sabotage.

  "Shit!"

&n
bsp; Cash turned his attention back to Wooster as the man started tapping randomly at his keyboard and pressing the power button on the monitor.

  "System's down. You're gonna have to cool your heels a little longer."

  Cash's chest bounced in a silent chuckle. Wooster was going to make him wait anyway. The man would let trucks sit on the lot a few extra hours before tagging Cash for a job.

  Returning the television to the original channel, he put the remote where he had found it. Unplugging his charger, he stuffed it in an empty pocket. After checking the phone for a signal and not finding one, he shoved it into the same pocket then swung his pack up from the ground and onto his back.

  "Going out for a smoke," he announced so Wooster wouldn't have an excuse to bump him down the roster while he was outside.

  "Ain't no one gonna steal your damn bag, Your Holiness," Wooster sniped as Cash opened the door to leave.

  He shrugged again, knowing the gesture pissed the dispatcher off more than words ever could. Cash didn't care how secure the area was or how honest the other drivers might be. His pack had a Browning takedown rifle and his Smith & Wesson M&P45 sidearm. Unless they were locked in a rig that only he had the keys to, the weapons went with him.

  He walked until he was the required fifteen feet from the building on the side opposite the fuel pumps before digging into one of his cargo pockets and pulling out a pack of Marlboro Reds. He fished out a lighter next, one of six. The other five were cheap Bics. The one he touched to the cigarette’s tip was waterproof, floated, had a direct flame and was hands free if needed.

  Cash took a lot of shit for the specialized lighter, his notebook, the cargo pants he usually wore and the heavy backpack that he watched like a hawk when it wasn’t strapped to him. The objects’ presence eased some of the tension that filled him on his trips away from home and the family he’d sworn to protect after returning from Iraq. With everything that was being reported on the news, he needed all the tension relief he could get.