I-80, Wyoming
Sparky’s voice came out of the tinny speakers. “Buck, there has been a terrorist attack in Red Mesa, Colorado. At that messed-up science place. It’s all over the news. You should—”
The audio kicked off. Buck couldn’t tell if it was because Sparky had stopped or his radio gave out, but he soon didn’t care.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled.
A rush of dizziness clouded his vision, and he desperately gripped the steering wheel to maintain consciousness.
“Buck, it’s happening again…” Connie’s voice might as well have been over the horizon, it sounded so far away. “The red.”
The yellow line down the middle of the dual highway lanes became a tunnel in his vision. The rest of the world was dark, save for a red tint on the remaining pinhole.
He fought to keep the truck on the line, although he tapped the brakes to slow the truck.
Don’t pass out, you dumb lug. People depend on you.
The intense buzzing sensation in his head passed as quickly as it arrived. When his vision firmed up, he adjusted the wheel to make sure he was in the lane, then he looked at his side mirror.
Fuck me.
Sparky’s blue Mack shot off the highway into the median.
“He’s tipping,” Buck said dryly.
“Who?” Connie replied weakly.
It happened in slow motion. Sparky’s truck tore into the soft ground between the lanes because he came in at an angle. The direction of the wheels was controlled by the force driving them into the dirt, and they yanked his entire rig to the left. A competent driver would steer into the turn to avoid putting so much stress on the frame, but Sparky either didn’t or couldn’t.
The truck’s front left tire continued to dig into the dirt, and nine of the eighteen wheels were soon off the ground.
At the same time, the roadway behind his rig filled with white smoke as the other two semis locked up their brakes to avoid leaving the highway with Sparky.
Finally, the giant Mack truck fell over. The fifth wheel sheered under the extreme stress, and the kingpin separated. The entire tractor-trailer seemed to wring itself out like a wet towel. The front half was yanked left with the tractor, while the back half swung right with momentum. Eventually, the whole warped box trailer split open like a sleeve of crackers. Pallets of boxes hemorrhaged out the sides.
Buck finally stomped on his brakes and brought his trailer to a safe stop.
Smoke and dust whipped past his windows. None of the three trucks were visible as he glanced back because of the debris in the air, but his immediate concern was for Connie and Mac.
“You okay?” he asked her.
She sat straight up in her chair, held there by the seatbelt. A second after he hit the e-brake, she shucked off the belt and reached under the dashboard.
“I’m fine.” Mac sat up and gave her a lick on the hands. “We’re fine.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah, go,” she replied with insistence. Somehow, she knew exactly what he was going to do.
“I’ll be right back.”
He jumped down from his truck and was greeted by a disaster. Sparky’s rig was on its side between the two directions of the interstate. Eve had jackknifed her red Peterbilt, so her cab faced backward. Monsignor was between the other two, stopped, but holding onto his steering wheel like he’d barely dodged the twenty-six-inch shell of a battleship.
Everyone, please be okay.
CHAPTER 22
Princess Anne, Maryland
Lydia patted the white cloth hanging from a belt at her midsection. “I’m stuffed. Do you eat this much every day?”
Garth laughed. “I could eat that meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and not get tired of it. Something about a Big Mac always makes me want another one.”
She held up the cup of soda. “And this fizzy drink? Uh, soda? You consume this all the time too?”
He scratched his ear. “Well, not always. Dad doesn’t let me have it on school days. Says it makes me lose my concentration. He also doesn’t let me have it after dinner. Says it keeps me up at night. However, Sam’s parents aren’t as strict.”
It struck him how often he did the opposite of what his dad told him to do.
Garth drove off the McDonald’s lot and pulled up to the gas pump in the station next door. He made up his mind to go for broke and try to buy a full tank of gas. As much as it impressed Lydia to go for forty miles on those two gallons, he didn’t want to spend every half-hour faking his way into gas stations to buy a few drops of fuel.
“You stay here,” he said after turning off the engine. “I’ll be right back. This time I want to go in and out without any trouble, okay?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “I will stay here with my drink. It is so delicious.”
He got out, then looked back into the car. “You are drinking Sprite, which is one of the tamer sodas. When I think you’re ready for it, I’ll get you the good stuff. It’s called Mountain Dew.”
Lydia grinned. “It sounds like a heavenly place. I loved seeing the mountains.”
“No, it’s not really from there. Well, maybe it is…” It went on his list to check the next can or bottle he found. Maybe it was made in Colorado or Wyoming?
“Be right back,” he assured her.
The convenience store had been crowded while he and Lydia ate lunch, but now the congestion had ebbed a bit. There were a couple of biker-looking guys at the soda fountain, an elderly woman studying the candy aisle, and a couple of teenage boys in baseball uniforms grabbing large boxes of Twinkies and Ding Dongs.
He walked up to the tattooed dark-haired woman behind the counter with all the confidence he could summon.
“I’d like to buy fifty dollars of gas on Pump 1.”
She held out her hand and he gave her a fifty-dollar bill, which was the change he had from his earlier purchases. Dad’s bugout bag had included four crisp hundred dollar bills, which at first seemed like a fortune, but after the motel and miscellaneous purchases, he now realized how fast he’d gone through most of the first two.
“You’re golden,” she said dismissively.
He stood there for a few moments, unsure what it meant. He’d been prepared to argue his way through the transaction.
I guess I look older in Maryland.
Grateful for the luck, he shot out the door and went back to the car. Lydia remained exactly where she’d been, sipping soda through her straw. When he reached in to unlock the gas tank door, she waved at him like he’d been gone for a week.
“Hiya, Garth! I’m loving this!” She pointed to the drink.
“Wouldn’t you know it? You just said their motto.”
“I’m going to fill us all the way to the top. They didn’t ask for ID or anything in there. We should be out on the highway and making great time in a few minutes.”
“Wonderful!” she exclaimed.
He spent an additional moment looking at her through the window. Her glowing eyes and excitable demeanor reminded him of kids who’d come home from a night of trick or treating on Halloween. She was hopped up on sugar.
She was the only thing on his mind as he gassed up.
Was it harmful to give her so much sugar so fast? Did he have the right to deny it to her? If he’d gone through time from a land of eating leaves and berries and ended up here with giant burgers and pounds of chocolate, he’d want to dive in. He figured it was best to let her go crazy with it.
When the machine kicked off, he noticed he’d only spent forty-eight dollars and a few cents, but he’d told the lady he would spend fifty.
What would Dad do?
Garth looked around, unsure. The other drivers were busy with their own fueling situations and had no interest in him. Dad had never explained this procedure, but he’d seen him mess around with the handle, like he wanted to put more gas in the tank after the pump had stopped. That was what Dad would do here, he figured. Get every cent of fuel he could.
“What the hell,” he mumbled.
He pulled the handle and squirted more gas into his tank, but it shut off a second later. The amount on the pump hardly moved. After trying it a few more times, he figured out it was a safety measure to keep people from overfilling their tanks and spilling it on the pavement.
After hanging up the pump and securing his tank door, he went past Lydia again. “I’ll be right back. I have to go inside again to get change.”
“Fine and dandy!” she replied happily.
As he walked back in, it struck him how easy it would be to blow some more money and buy the Mountain Dew he had promised her. It would be a good drink for doing a lot of driving, but he figured that much sugar and caffeine could hurt Lydia, so he resolved to wait until the next gas station to introduce her to it.
Once inside the swinging doors, he had a moment to orient on the register before his brain short-circuited. A red flash seemed to come from inside his eyeballs, like he’d been zapped by electricity. In the next instant, a dizzy feeling overwhelmed him.
“Whoa!”
He and several other patrons fell to the ground, and a plastic cup tumbled in the next aisle. The sound of sloshing liquid was accompanied by cussing.
The feeling didn’t last long. His head was soon back to normal, but he took some time to sit and recover.
“I need to pay and get out of here,” he mumbled.
After he got to his feet, Garth helped the two teenage boys to theirs. They collected their boxes of goodies, then followed him to the front counter.
A man in a fancy black suit was already there.
Wait up. There’s two.
He blinked several times, not sure if he saw double.
Garth figured out there were two of them, but one was on the other side of the counter.
He lined up behind the first man in the suit, but something about him was off. The posture of the guy was confusing, like he was leaning against the low counter and whispering to the tattooed clerk. The look on her face was unabashed fear.
Danger!
A breath caught in his throat. His body begged him to run away, so he went backward.
“Watch it, dude,” one of the baseball players said when he ran into him.
The suited man heard the voice and spun around to see who it was.
Garth’s eyes went directly to the man’s pistol.
Central Station, Sydney, Australia
It was noon when the engineer brought the engine into the station to deliver the abandoned passenger and the engineer trainee. The trip had taken about twice as long as it should have because every station along the way had lots of people wanting a ride and no carriages to carry them. Gladys insisted they stop at every one and inform the passengers of the problems with the rail lines.
She wanted to scream, but there was no faster way to get to Sydney.
Finally, after what felt like a full lifetime to Destiny, Gladys guided the train to the end of the same walkway where she’d jumped on to catch it during departure. She hopped up, ready to run out the door.
“Thanks for coming to get us,” she said to the engineer to be polite. “And thank you for coming with me through those woods,” she told Becker.
“I admit that I wanted out of there as much as you did.” The young man looked at his feet before asking, “Will you be all right?”
She held out her hands. “I have no baggage, so I’m just going to get a cab and head out. You two should get home, too. After what we saw last night and at those other stations, I don’t think the trains will be running much longer.”
“I won’t be driving one,” Becker answered.
Gladys opened the door. “They told me I was going to be awarded time-and-a-half for working this continuous shift, but now I think it’s laughable. They’re going to have to throw ten times that amount at me for me to head back down those tracks.”
Destiny shook hands with both of them, then hurried out the door and down the steps. As she reached the platform, the wave of dizziness came back like a ninja out of the night. It slapped her with a red pulse of energy right behind her eyes.
Destiny woke up and found she’d fallen to the concrete.
“Not again,” she mumbled.
The wave passed as quickly as before, and she sprang to her feet to see if anything had changed.
Becker was on the floor inside the cabin of the engine.
“You okay?” she called.
He propped himself up. “I think I packed my dacks, mate.”
She hoped he hadn’t really soiled his pants, but wouldn’t blame him. It was a creepy sensation.
“What is going on?” he pressed. “Was that what happened to us when our engine disappeared?”
“No. Back then was different. This time it was sharp and had a red glow. Did you see it?”
Both of the train employees nodded in agreement. “Red lasers burned my eyes,” Becker added. “Like fucking aliens.”
“No, it’s not coming from the stars. These headache-inducing dizzy spells are being caused by something on the other side of the planet. An experiment gone wrong.”
“How can you possibly know such a thing?” he asked.
“Because my sister is in charge of it. She told me weird things were happening with time. Back in Canberra, I saw animals that had been extinct for tens of thousands of years.” She watched as he stood up. Gladys recovered in the engine behind him. “The Opera House is gone, not destroyed. It’s as if it were never there. Time has come undone.”
“What can we do?” he asked in a timid voice.
She shrugged. “Hell if I know, but I’m going to find out. See ya round, okay?”
Destiny pulled out her phone and dialed Faith as she walked into the main terminal. She didn’t worry about the exact time zone conversion, but she guessed it was early evening in Denver.
“Come on, dammit! Pick up!”
She had to know how much worse life was going to get, and Faith was the one person she trusted to tell her the truth.
I-80, Wyoming
Buck had chosen not to pull over, thinking it wouldn’t matter. Eve’s rig was almost sideways because it had jackknifed, and Monsignor was next to her. Cars would not be able to get by them.
The smoke and dust had mostly blown away as he hustled into the median and ran alongside Sparky’s Mack. It had been tossed to the side, so the driver’s window was in the dirt. However, the glass of the front windshield had imploded completely, giving him easy access to the interior.
Sparky was still buckled in, and he smiled from behind the half-deflated airbag.
“Just had a helluva ride,” he said. “I blacked out and woke up sideways.”
“I almost zoned out, too,” Buck admitted. “Eve had issues, but she kept the wheels down.”
“I’m assuming my load is gone?” the other driver said despondently.
Buck nodded.
Sparky thought for a second. “Well, shit.”
“On the bright side, you’re alive. That was a big wreck, hoss.”
“Don’t do anything unless you’re going to give it your best. Apparently, I went all-in, because I never scratched a bumper until today.”
Buck held out his hand. “We have to get you out of there. We have to keep moving. Think you can get out?”
Sparky moved his arms and wiggled his fingers. “Looks like I’m fine. Let me pop the belt and gather a few things, and I’ll climb out this new door I’ve made in the windshield.”
Buck drew a deep breath. He’d only met Sparky the day before, but he’d come to appreciate the other driver as the lynchpin of his team. It would have been terrible to lose him to something so random.
After watching Sparky unclick his belt and crawl out of his seat, he ran over to Eve’s red rig. Monsignor was out of his truck, helping direct her so she could straighten out her trailer without running off the highway.
“You okay, ma’am?” he called up to her.
She smil
ed tentatively. “I film myself around the clock. It makes for good promotional materials when I’m recruiting. However, I’m going to delete this accident. I’ve never jackknifed like this. It’s rookie material.”
“You know, whatever it was that made us all black out, you may have caught it on film. You should hold onto the tape.”
“We’ll see how I feel when we get to safety.”
“Fair enough,” Buck agreed.
“You got this?” he asked as he walked up to Monsignor.
The young guy had a thousand-yard-stare. “I’ll get her out of here, don’t worry about it. Is Sparky good?”
“Yeah. He’s banged up, but there is no blood. I’m not sure how he did it, but he said he blacked out. Maybe it helped save his life.” Since he spent his life on the road, he’d heard every story about crashes there was. Sometimes, people who fell asleep at the wheel or drove shit-faced drunk got into accidents and survived simply because they were too out of it to brace themselves and break something. Sparky had been saved by the same debilitating dizzy spell that had made him crash.
Buck realized they were now a truck short. “Hey, can you or Eve take him in your rig? I’m already plus one.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Monsignor monotoned.
“Hey, driver!” Buck yelled.
The other man seemed to snap out of his daze.
“Relax,” Buck suggested in an even voice. “You look like you’re in shock.”
“Yeah, maybe I am. I watched Sparky go into the dirt, and I almost rammed into him when I had an episode behind the wheel. I thought the bomb was going to go off.” He pointed to his shiny fuel carrier. His biggest fear was blowing up with it.
“You’re good,” Buck assured him. “We’re all alive. Get her pointed in the right direction, put Sparky in a seat, and let’s get the hell out of here. Four-wheelers are going to whiz by here in minutes.”
Monsignor gave him a thumbs-up.
Buck ran back to his Peterbilt, already thinking about what had to happen next. Once they were all in their trucks and going east, he’d have to balance the need to go faster and get beyond Interstate 25 with the need to keep it slow in case they experienced more of the dizzy spells.
Broad America: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure (End Days Book 3) Page 17