by Ginger Booth
“Cam, we’re out of time,” I said. “High ground to the right. But there’s no road! That bike path sort of–”
A deluxe paved bike path ran along the side of the parkway to our right. Deserted, like everything else. We hadn’t reached a residential area yet, hadn’t seen any people.
“Understood,” Cam said. Without further warning, he jerked the car to narrowly avert a bit of steel highway guardrail, a couple trees, and a chunk of granite the size of a riding lawn mower, to essentially leap us from the highway down onto the bike path. “Right direction?” he inquired.
“Yeah,” I squeaked. I unlocked my arms from their crash positions at dashboard and window. I dove down to fish the phone off the floor. I’d dropped it when my arms instinctively braced for impact.
New messages. I only checked one. Emmett had responded with a simple heart emoticon in response. When I uncurled from the floor, I glanced behind us through the rear window. Any illusion of a horizon was gone. A wall was coming, a greenish grey wall against the light blue sky. “Up, Cam. Now, Cam,” I breathed in terror.
He glanced in the rear-view window. “Right.”
And right it was. Cam swerved right through underbrush, a low point between the line of trees flanking the bike path. We bounded into a marshy stretch of flat grasses centered on a bit of babbling brook ditch, a typical northeastern storm sewer, created by simply shifting pre-existing brooks into a more convenient road-parallel heading.
Cam’s little electric car wasn’t a stream-hopping model. He backed up once to give it a second try, then declared time’s up. We grabbed one backpack each, abandoned the car, leapt across the narrow ditch, and started running uphill. I still can’t vouch for tornados, but an approaching tsunami does sound a bit like a freight train. Too bad its path is so much wider than train tracks.
We crashed through another hedgerow worth of winter-bare trees and briar cane, and ran across a rectangular field of winter-dead grass, rich in fragrant cow patties. Cam was a runner. Not me. Swimming’s my sport.
I half-fell, slipping on my second cow patty. Cam grabbed me, stripped me of my backpack, and hurled it away. He grabbed my hand the better to drag me by, and resumed running.
“Now we run like our lives depend on it!” he called out.
Because of course our lives did depend on it. Long Island had lovely barrier islands, probably even at that moment entirely underneath the first tsunami wave. Pretty little marshy islands daisy-chained across a lagoon-like bay behind us, followed by land so low it wasn’t inhabited even before the Calm. Too exposed to storm surges. None of it was any barrier at all to this big a wave. We hadn’t made it a mile from open water before we lost the car.
Mercifully, the next band of trees we crashed through had less underbrush. But we had to dodge left, not uphill, to run around an empty municipal pool, ringed with a rusted wire link fence. I gasped for air, Cam pulling me as much as me running. I was so grateful to break out onto smooth roadway.
Cam stopped, and yelled, “Breather!” over the roar of the oncoming catastrophe. I doubled over panting. He dug a few things out of his backpack. He slung a full canteen around my neck, and stuffed a satellite phone into his army camouflage jacket, some other things into utility pockets on his pants. Then he dropped the backpack before grabbing my arm to run again. Our breather was less than half a minute, and I’d barely caught my breath at all.
I refused to be the death of us. Cam would protect me with his life, if it came to that. I could damn well protect him, too, by not slowing him down. I ran, better than before the breather, no matter how short my breath was.
Beside the road, a park complex opened up to our left, the sort with big lawns and baseball diamonds, and pretty shade trees, winter-bare against the pale blue sky. Like the last field, whatever it used to be, this was prime LI pasture land now. The land rose higher in that direction, so we set across dead grass and cow patties again.
That’s where the churning frothing maelstrom of the tsunami crashed into us like a 6 foot wall.
Read the full book!
Table of Contents
Copyright
Author’s Invitation
Contents
Part I
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Free Stuff!
Part II
Maps
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Flyer
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part III
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Constitution of Hudson
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Free Ebooks
Books by Ginger Booth
Calm Act Timeline
Tsunami Wake