“Well, I don’t want to be here either, but I’m sure not going to Chicago. Not in a power outage like this.”
Gwen sighed and started walking. Alex followed her. He hadn’t specifically been told to keep an eye on the sheriff’s daughter, but he sensed that if he didn’t, she might do something stupid and try to go after them. Thankfully, the mechanic hadn’t fixed another vehicle yet. Still, Alex felt compelled to give her something to do—something to keep her busy until her dad came back with her sister.
“I was wondering if you might help me figure out the town’s food situation,” he said. “Hope only has the one grocery store, right?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no farm nearby, I know that much. Do you have hunters in town?”
“A few, I’m sure,” Gwen said. “I don’t know.”
Alex shook his head. “It wouldn’t be enough even if we did.”
“Why are you following me?”
Alex stopped in his tracks and Gwen turned to face him. “I’m not,” he said. “I just don’t know a lot about your town, and I’m trying to help.”
“Don’t you want to go back to your own town? Don’t you have family there?”
“Actually, my parents live here,” Alex said. “I have a few friends, but there isn’t much of a reason for me to walk fifteen miles just to get to a town that’s facing the same problem we are.”
“It’s not the same problem,” Gwen said. “We just battled a bunch of prisoners from Lone Oak, and people have died. They ransacked our grocery store, and everybody is living in fear.”
“Don’t forget the sick people,” Alex said.
“Exactly!”
“And running water,” he said. “We need to get a rain barrel system going.”
“Yes, of course,” she said.
“Listen,” Alex said, stepping closer to her. “We need to give people hope. Your dad is someone they trust, and someone who can lead them well, but he has to take care of your sister right now.”
“They aren’t children,” she snapped.
“Yes, that’s true, but they are scared.”
“And you’re not?”
Alex hadn’t been expecting the question. He wasn’t scared. He hadn’t had time to be scared since the prisoners had either been killed, jailed, or had run off.
“Not really,” he said. “Not yet. But I am concerned, and I don’t think anyone is going to take the initiative to enact survival mode around here.”
“So, you feel like that’s your responsibility?” she asked.
“Mine and yours,” he said. “I’m not the kind of person to sit on my hands and do nothing, and judging by how disappointed you are about not being able to go to Chicago, I’m guessing you aren’t either.”
Gwen bit the inside of her cheek, then she touched the bandage around her burned wrist. Alex actually could use her help. She knew the people of this town.
“I say we gather a few people you trust, I’ll get my folks, and we hold a meeting about the best way to move forward.”
“I don’t trust anyone here,” she said. “I mean, the McClure family helped my dad take on the prisoners. Maybe they could help.”
Alex had been around the McClures only a little since the big fight a couple of days ago. They had been heralded as heroes for about a day, then the people of Hope remembered the kind of people they were dealing with—the people who had often ended up arrested for disturbing the peace or who were known for domestic fights that ended in gunfire. Alex didn’t think any of them had actually shot another person but he wasn’t entirely sure.
Not wanting to turn her down right out, Alex said, “Sure…if you think they would be a help, we can bring one or two of them to meet with us.”
Gwen smiled at this, and Alex wasn’t sure why. He shook the question from his head and breathed deeply.
“All right,” Alex said. “Let’s get everybody together and meet in an hour.”
He hoped they could come up with a feasible plan. And deep down, Alex knew he was just trying to keep Gwen busy. However, he wanted to do something worthwhile for the town. They needed a real plan of action—one that would lead them through this crisis. If they didn’t, people were going to die, and in a matter of weeks, they could all be dead.
Chapter Eleven
Henry pressed his forehead against the window as he and Leland drove down Interstate 90 toward Chicago. In one sense, it was good that the power had gone out in the middle of the night. That meant less traffic, which meant fewer dead cars to weave through as they traveled. Still, Leland had to let up on the gas every couple of minutes, but when they hit a long stretch, he would push the old Jeep to about ninety miles per hour. As for getting to the middle of Chicago and back, they had enough gas, but Henry wasn’t sure what would happen once they got near the city. There would be more people. Stranded people. People who would want a way to get out. There would be few, if any, vehicles moving like theirs. Just having a working car made them targets.
He wondered if they were being completely stupid trying to get to their loved ones. Just 48 hours before, they had traveled together on foot just to rescue Gwen, but this was on another level. If it had just been for Leland’s other daughter, Cora, Henry wouldn’t be on this trip. He would have told Leland to have a nice life and would have gone on his way. But since Sam was there—so close to Cora, no less—Henry had no other choice.
Getting to Sam had more benefits than just realizing his only family was safe—he had a feeling Sam was privy to what was going on. At least, his little brother would have a solid theory. Henry figured it was an EMP, but he still couldn’t figure to what extent. Was it global? National? Regional?
Henry felt depressed every time they passed stranded drivers—people who had been walking the road for two days now. He wanted to stop and give them food and water, but they couldn’t risk it. Not only would they have to conserve what they had for themselves along with Cora and Sam, but the moment they stopped, they would be mobbed by anyone nearby desperate to get home. Stopping the Jeep meant losing the Jeep, and they couldn’t afford to be in that scenario.
He wanted to puke when he saw a family of four walking alongside the interstate. The father of the group tried to wave them down as the mother clung to a toddler’s hand and nursed a baby.
Leland kept his stare straight and on the road, not allowing himself to see anyone in detail. Henry didn’t question it and commended the sheriff in his mind on doing something Henry wouldn’t have been able to do.
Henry didn’t want to look away. He wanted to remember this tragedy—one that would no doubt be remembered for decades to come. He didn’t know what they would learn in the future, but if he had kids one day, he wanted to be able to tell them the horrors of what he saw.
People deal with tragedy in a variety of ways. There are those who stare straight ahead and try to ignore what’s happening around them, and those who take note of it all. One wasn’t better than the other. Henry thought perhaps the ones who tried to ignore the immediate tragedy around them were the smart ones. There was less danger of them giving in to the temptation of trying to help rather than focusing on what would help them and their family survive. Someone like Henry was likely to die from being too distracted.
If he were driving, would he have stopped for the family? Would he have done what he could to at least get them a few miles down the road? He didn’t know. As innocent as they looked, that didn’t mean the mother and father wouldn’t slit his throat to take the Jeep. They had their little ones to care for after all.
He had heard about apocalyptic tales in the past. Every one of them was about bringing humanity back down to its most basic form: survivalist. In the immediate, survival had nothing to do with compassion. It had nothing to do with looking out for one another. It was all about doing whatever it took to stay alive. The descent always happened quickly. Two days and they were already ignoring babies on the side of the road.
Henry tried not to throw
up.
He glanced at Leland. “You’ve been to Chicago, right?”
Leland paused, then said, “Yeah, a few times.”
“What do you think we’re going to run into?”
“Aren’t you from there?” Leland said.
“Yeah.”
“So, you tell me. What are we going to run into?”
Henry sighed and looked back out the window. This time he saw an old man holding up a thumb as they zoomed past him.
“It’s not going to be good, Leland.”
Leland didn’t say anything, but Henry knew what he was thinking. The sheriff was resolved to finding his daughter and getting her out of there.
“What are we going to do with the Jeep?” Henry asked. “If we abandon it, we’re going to lose it.”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there. Your family have a garage or anything?”
Henry shook his head. “No. And I’m just looking for my brother, not the rest of my family. He’s got a small apartment. No car. No garage.”
“Is he the only family you have?”
Henry wasn’t expecting the question. Having spent the last five years in prison, he had learned to keep personal information guarded. No one at Lone Oak had known about his family—Sam, his mom, Scott.
“Yeah,” Henry said. His mom was dead. After Henry’s trial and conviction, she took off and didn’t tell him where she was going. From what Henry could gather from a few of his conversations with Sam over the years, she was traveling out west somewhere. Then she died from a drug overdose.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” Leland asked.
“It’s been a while,” Henry said shortly.
Leland didn’t try to ask more questions, and Henry was grateful.
They had to slow the truck to an uncomfortable crawl as they got closer and closer to the city. Henry could tell that the traffic was bottlenecking, and they could see more people stranded on the side of the road. Soon, they reached a point where they had to stop. This made Henry and Leland nervous at first, especially with a crowd of people gathered up ahead of them. Leland slowed to a crawl, then cut the engine.
What were they all looking at? Henry opened his door and stepped out to get a better look. Leland did the same.
Henry gaped as he realized what he was looking at. Debris covered the ground. Clothes, suitcases, metal shards in every direction.
Right in the middle of the road was a downed aircraft—a massive, colossal plane that had ripped a hole directly through the middle of the interstate. People were rummaging through the debris, looking for anything that may be used for their survival. It had been a couple of days, so neither Leland nor Henry had noticed the smoke until now.
Anything useful would have been taken by now. The strangest part of it all was seeing this kind of wreckage without any emergency vehicles or blaring sirens.
Henry felt dumbfounded by what they saw.
Seeing it only confirmed what he had suspected all along: that this was an EMP attack. Only something that massive, only something so terrible could knock planes out of the sky.
He heard shuffling feet behind him. His heart nearly leaped out of his throat when he realized that a group of men, each of them holding a makeshift club in their hands, were coming straight for them. They had seen them drive up, and they wanted the jeep.
Chapter Twelve
Leland saw the men coming after them about the same time as Henry. The two of them jumped back into the car, and by the time Leland turned over the engine, one of the men had already busted out the back window with a crowbar.
Another jumped on the hood as Leland slammed his foot against the gas pedal. The Jeep lurched forward, and the men smashed their clubs down on the windshield, cracking it into a thousand spiderwebbed pieces. When he looked to the right, he saw Henry being pulled out of his seat and dragged to the ground.
Leland tried to reach for Henry, but it was too late, and Leland couldn’t stop the Jeep or the looters would get it.
The jeep sped toward the plane wreckage quickly, and Leland knew he had to stop. He slammed on the brakes, and the two men on the hood went flying into the mangled metal plane parts.
Leland yanked out his pistol and readied himself in case someone else tried to attack him. One of the men that had jumped on the hood of the jeep remained on the ground, but the other one got up and pulled a gun from his belt.
Leland swore under his breath and knocked the Jeep into reverse, then he hit the gas again. Glass shattered as bullets slammed into the front of the Jeep. Leland ducked down and tried to maneuver his way around, but the Jeep felt sluggish. He could tell by the way it was driving that the front tires were flat.
Leland stopped the Jeep and flung the door open to use it as a shield as the bullets kept coming his way. He held tightly to his pistol, waiting for a lull in the fire. He heard people screaming as they scattered to get away from the gunfight. He couldn’t believe that stopping the vehicle was all it took to get into this kind of situation.
When he peeked over the window, he saw the man walking toward him, loading another clip. Leland didn’t want to shed blood, but if he was going to make it to Cora, he was going to do what he had to. As the man pulled back on the chamber to ready another flurry of bullets, Leland aimed, squinted, and let off three rounds. He watched as the man flew back to the ground.
“Get him!” he heard another man shout from behind.
For a brief moment, Leland looked around for Henry but couldn’t find him. Hopefully, Henry had gotten away and wasn’t a victim of this mob.
Leland tried to let off a round toward the oncoming hostiles, but the group of men was not deterred. They overpowered him. Leland thought they were about to kill him. He felt a sharp pain in the back of his head, then his vision started to darken. Within a few seconds, he was out.
Chapter Thirteen
Gwen felt energized by the idea of actually getting to work. She wasn’t sure what kind of plan they would come up with, but doing something, anything, in the face of this tragedy, was better than waiting around and hoping things would turn out well.
Things weren’t going to turn out well. The world was blacked out, or at least her world was blacked out. The reports from scouts were already in: other towns were facing the same kind of problem. Her dad had already assumed the worst and figured Chicago was facing the same thing, but Gwen held out hope that her sister had been spared this disaster.
She knew that wasn’t true. This was bigger than anything any of them had ever witnessed. She just didn’t want to accept it.
This kind of situation called for a strong leader. Her dad was the only person she could see filling that role for this town, but since he wasn’t here, Gwen felt a certain responsibility for trying to take action. Next to that, Alex felt compelled to lead so they could try to survive this. There were others, Gwen was sure, who were formulating plans, but not for the whole town—only for themselves or their own families. Someone needed to take a stand and pull the town together so that they could all survive as one rather than separate individuals.
Alex had gathered a small group of townspeople. He had brought his parents, Jeff and Linda, and asked one of the McClures to join them as well. Normally, Gwen wouldn’t have advised them to seek the help of the McClures, but considering how much they had helped her dad in the fight just a couple of days ago, they were the sort who could be counted on to help. Alex had only talked to Uncle Frank, but Bryson and his grandma had come along too.
Gwen had considered a couple of the city council members, but most of them were more worried about their homes and the devastation that the prisoners from Lone Oak had caused than they were about formulating a plan. They were the kind of people who got new traffic lights or voted to fix sidewalks. They weren’t the kind of people one relied upon to figure out how to keep the town from starving and who made sure they would have enough water for everyone the next day.
“What have we found in the other
towns?” Jeff asked. He was a gray-haired, balding man with glasses and a furrowed brow.
“What did you see?” Alex asked Bryson.
Bryson looked around at each of them and shrugged. “It’s the same stuff everywhere you go. I mean, the other towns didn’t have a giant prison attack, but they are going to run out of food and water all the same.”
Bryson had been one of the few people who was sent out to check on neighboring areas to see if this was an isolated incident and he had just gotten back that morning. There were other tiny towns several miles away. They were substantial enough to get a good read on the situation, and they told us that Hope was not a completely isolated incident.
“So the mechanic is working on getting us cars or trucks?” Alex asked. The question didn’t seem to be directed at anyone. They already knew the answer. Alex just seemed to be making sure everything was falling into place. “We will need to organize a trip to bigger towns. Maybe there is someone out there who can help us.”
Gwen shook her head. “No, that’s not what we need to be doing. Each town is going to want to hoard their own food and water. And we can’t just rely on someone else to help us. We have to figure out a way to fix the situation for ourselves as a town. We need to gather all the hunters, and we need to figure out who all has wells outside of town that can be manually operated. We also need to gather everything that’s in the grocery store before people start stealing it all.”
“We’ve taken care of that,” grandma said. “The McClures are guarding the grocery store and not letting anyone get in or out until we’ve decided what to do.”
“So,” Uncle Frank said, “all the frozen and refrigerated stuff is going to be spoiled pretty quickly if it isn’t already. We need to protect the bottled drinks and non-perishable foods. And we can ration it out as we see fit.”
“Yes, but that’s going to last a few days at best,” Linda said.
“It’ll last longer than you think,” Uncle Frank said.
Fallen Earth | Book 2 | Aftermath Page 6