Carl wondered if it was such a good idea for this man to be armed after all.
Chapter Ten
The hotel lobby was empty of human life. Carl wondered why, since a building like this ought to have attracted refugees or stragglers, but a quick inhalation of the air told the tale. Smoke was drifting down the hall into the lobby. While not heavy, the smoke was enough to tell Carl that something in this building was on fire. And with no running water and no fire trucks, there was no chance of putting it out.
“Damn,” Carl said, “This place is on fire somewhere. The people must have bailed.”
Preston glared at the hallway ahead. “Yeah, well, I’m not leaving without my gun.” Then he stepped past Carl and Shyanne, and ran down the hall.
“Preston, wait!” Carl shouted.
Shyanne coughed. “Mister Carl, I don’t like this.”
“Oh, believe me, I’d rather be anywhere but here,” Carl said as Preston made a right turn and disappeared down an adjoining hallway. What should he do? Run after Preston? But he’d be carrying Shyanne into a smoke-filled building that only was going to get worse. He could leave her in the lobby while he retrieved Preston. However, what if someone from that mob out there showed up and attacked her?
Enough, Carl thought. If he wants to take the risk, then let him. You ought to just leave and take Shyanne to safety all by yourself.
It was tempting. But Carl’s sense of duty wouldn’t let him. Preston was a civilian. Carl understood the duty of a soldier, even if he no longer was on active duty. Besides, Preston had saved Carl’s life. Carl did owe the man one.
“Shyanne, sweetie, keep your face covered under your shirt. This is going to be quick. If I tell you to run, you run. Got it?”
The little girl obeyed, slipping her shirt over her nose.
Carl then dashed through the hall, the medical bag still over his shoulder, while keeping his head down. Since smoke rises, Carl would at least be able to escape the worst of it by lowering his head. He followed Preston’s path down the right hall, past a multitude of closed doors, until he discovered one of the rooms was open. That had to be Preston’s room.
Carl carried Shyanne through the open door. “Preston!” Carl shouted.
The drawers to the bedroom dresser lay open. Preston was flinging open his closet door while muttering, “Where is it?”
Carl was about to shout at him for running off when suddenly a door down the hall fell open, and a burst of flame lashed out. A large mass of smoke quickly wafted down the hallway.
Carl immediately backed into the room and shut the door. “Carl! What the hell was that?” Preston shouted as he tore shirts from the hangers to better expose his closet.
“The fire’s bursting into the hall!” Carl put down Shyanne and told her, “Quick! Lie on the floor and cover your nose.” The girl obeyed while Carl ripped the bed sheets free. Then he blocked the space under the door with the fabric.
“That’ll block the smoke until we find a way out of here!”
Unfortunately, the hotel room had no other doors, just a big, slightly dirty glass window, with the side parking lot beyond it. Fortunately, this room was on the bottom floor. If they just could break through the glass, they could escape.
“Great. We got our way out.” He found mechanical cranks on the window, but to his horror, there were no handles. Carl grabbed a nearby chair and heaved it against the window. The glass bounced but did not break. Carl hit it again and again, with similar results.
In frustration, Carl tossed the chair aside. “Remind me to thank the management for spending their cleaning budget on reinforced glass!”
“Got it!” Preston pulled a bag out from the closet. He unzipped it and pulled out a black handgun. He dug back in the bag. “Clip, clip, where’s my clip?”
Smoke started seeping through the top crack of the door. “Shyanne, over here, hurry!” Carl ordered. The girl got up and raced toward him. Carl then ushered Shyanne to the floor. “Keep your head down and breathe.”
He turned to Preston, ready to tear the bag from his grasp to find the clip himself, but fortunately Preston found it himself. “Here!” Then he jammed the clip into the gun.
“The window!” Carl pointed to the glass. “Shoot it out! We can’t get out through the hall!”
“You want me to waste ammo on the window?” Preston asked.
“The hall’s on fire!” Carl pointed to the left crank on the window. “Shoot it out! Now! Or we’re all dead!”
Preston aimed where Carl said and squeezed the trigger. The latch busted open.
“This one!” Carl pointed to the right latch. Preston obeyed. The window jostled loose. Carl quickly pushed on it, but the window wouldn’t break loose fully from the frame.
Carl gritted his teeth. “Here, give me that!”
Preston handed Carl the gun. Carl fired three more times, shooting the glass free of the frame at key points. Then he tucked the gun into his belt before grabbing the chair and heaving it hard at the loose glass. This time, the window pane broke completely free of the frame.
Carl quickly picked up Shyanne. “Now, let’s go!”
The three of them climbed through the open pane, then charged for the open lot. It was only when they turned around that they discovered the extent of the hotel fire. Flames were leaping out of five windows, and a large tower of smoke ascended from the back of the building.
Preston panted. “Holy shit! That was too close.”
Carl quickly checked to see the medical bag had remained over his shoulder and that he had lost nothing during the escape before responding to Preston. “Too close?” Carl glared at him. “You saw the smoke coming down the hall! Why’d you go back for the gun? We have a little girl with us!”
“Nobody asked you to follow me or to drag her along!” Preston then reached down and pulled the gun from Carl’s belt. “And thanks to you, I just lost most of my clip shooting out that window!”
“If I hadn’t come to get you, you’d probably be dead,” Carl said. The flames from two of the windows leapt higher, seemingly proving Carl’s point.
Preston released the clip and checked it. “Two shots.” He slapped it back in. “Great. That’s going to do us a lot of good when a mob of fifty or a hundred comes after us!”
“Please stop fighting,” Shyanne said. She turned her head slightly in Preston’s direction, looking at him with sad brown eyes.
Carl, still holding the girl, nodded. “Yeah. I guess grown men can act even dumber than children sometimes.” Then he coughed. The air was thickening with smoke. He needed to get Shyanne away from here as quickly as possible.
But even as Carl and Preston left the hotel’s parking lot and stepped onto the sidewalk of another boulevard, the air quality didn’t improve much. This boulevard consisted of two streets, one going south, one north, with a median bisecting them. Like the other roads, it was littered with abandoned vehicles. Up ahead at least three cars were burning, and two others were flipped onto their tops. The scene made Carl’s skin crawl. Vandals were sure to be lurking in that direction.
Shyanne buried her face in Carl’s shoulder. “We’re not going that way! Please say we’re not going that way!”
Carl patted her back. “Don’t worry. We’ll find another way.”
Raising his head to the horizon, Preston held his hand up across his forehead. “There’s a lot of smoke trails over there. Carl, there’s got to be a ton of fires that way.”
The wind picked up and blew some of the arid smoke their way. Carl and Shyanne both coughed. “Damn.” Carl turned around and started down the other direction. “Let’s make tracks.”
Preston caught up. “I hate to bring this up, but it’s going to be night soon. Is that better or worse for us?”
“Well, for one thing, none of these street lamps are going to be on, so it’s going to be almost pitch black out here. A lot of crazies are going to be out at night, too. If we can’t get out of the city, we’ll have to hunker down s
omewhere for the night.”
Before long they reached an intersection with a two-lane road with no median. Pedestrians, almost all of them adults, crossed from left to right. Some ran, some walked, and some staggered as if in shock. As Carl and Preston slowed, they noticed one or two of the pedestrians would break off and head for a house off the road.
“Many of these people probably left their vehicles and are trying to get home,” Carl said. “Alright. We walk with them.”
“Shouldn’t we try to run? The city’s burning behind us,” Preston said.
“This way, we’ll blend in. The idea in a crisis is not to draw attention to yourself. Put the gun in your pocket and try to hide it. Do not let anyone see it. They’ll either try to steal it, or it could set them off.” Carl then looked at Preston. “There are folks around here who probably snapped a lot worse than you did at the drugstore.”
Preston bit his lip. “Yeah.” He stuck the gun in his pocket, then pulled his shirt over it to try covering the handle.
Carl carried Shyanne down the street with Preston on his right side. Thanks to a change in the wind, there was not as much smoke on this street.
“You feeling okay?” Carl asked Shyanne. “It doesn’t feel bad to breathe, right?”
Shyanne shook her head. “I’m better.”
“Good. Now, we’re just taking a walk. A nice, relaxing walk,” Carl said.
So far, nobody was paying much attention to the bare-chested, well-muscled Caucasian man with a beat-up bag over his shoulder, holding a small African-American girl, or his lanky companion. The lack of commotion provided Carl with ample time to listen in on the other people’s conversations when he passed close enough. Some people thought the calamity around them was caused by a terrorist attack. Others thought it was a lightning storm. A few still claimed an ordinary power outage had taken place.
It’s still early in this, Carl thought. Some of them still think the police or the army’s going to show up. Listening in didn’t do much to encourage Carl. A lot of people still were in for a rude awakening. Still, the walk gave Carl time to gather his wits and calm his nerves.
“Mister Carl?” Shyanne asked, “Are we going to find the other soldiers?”
“Other soldiers? You mean the military?” Carl said.
“Yeah. They’re going to help us, right?”
Carl gave Shyanne an extra lift to stabilize her in his grasp. “Well, it’s going to be hard to get in touch with them. You see, the phones don’t work, so we can’t talk to each other. Now, some of my fellow soldiers might have some radios that might work. But it’s going to take a while to talk to each other. We might have to wait for them to find us.”
The dearth of immediate danger gave Carl some time to think. He knew almost nothing about this little girl who had become part of his and Preston’s flight through the city. He had pulled Shyanne out of her hiding place, away from the area where her dead father lay, and carried her along, and in one instance into danger. Should he have stopped and questioned her? Did he remove her from her other family? Did she have a mother?
Carl cursed himself. He had been running on adrenaline for so long, but sometimes adrenaline gave you tunnel vision. If this girl had loved ones waiting for her, he had a duty to find out.
“Shyanne, I was wondering. Do you have anybody at home waiting for you? I didn’t think to ask,” Carl said.
The girl shook her head. “Just me and Daddy.”
“No Mommy?”
“No. She died when I was very little.”
Very little? Since Shyanne was probably a first or second grader, that could mean she died when Shyanne was a baby. Kids’ recollections sometimes could be unreliable, or at least a little skewed.
“So, there’s nobody at your home,” Carl said with a sigh.
“No. Daddy and I went out to get water when the bad things happened,” Shyanne said.
“Sounds like a smart guy,” Carl said with bitter regret. Damn, if he’d have just made it to that street corner near the drugstore sooner. But perhaps beating himself up over it would do no good.
“What about aunts, uncles? You have a grandma? Grandpa? Maybe we can find them.”
“Grandpa Edgar and Grandma Mary is in Florida. I don’t know where Grandpa Bill is. Grandma Estelle went to Heaven.”
Carl nodded. Grandpa Bill could be anywhere, perhaps somewhere in this metro area, or perhaps out of state, or he might not even be active in Shyanne’s life and only was talked about. Trying to reach the other two grandparents was a non-starter, as without working airplanes they could not reach Florida without a long trek on foot. Plus, Carl shuddered at the thought of how Florida would become in the aftermath of this disaster. A fairly small state with densely packed populations from top to bottom? He feared for the fate of the people living there, especially the elderly.
With a heavy heart, Carl resigned himself to the likely fact that this girl had nobody in this city who could take her in. He might have to take her all the way to whatever safe location he could reach.
So be it, he thought.
His thoughts abruptly were shattered by a loud pop. Gunfire! Carl came to a stop and nearly dropped to the ground, if not for the fact he was holding Shyanne.
“What is it? What is it?” Shyanne cried out.
Preston came to a halt next to Carl. Others around them screamed, turned and fled, or dropped to the ground. Carl kept his wits to check out the scene ahead. On his side of the street, several meters ahead, two young men were shooting at a small suburban home.
Preston drew his gun, but Carl quickly said, “Wait! Not yet! We’re still far away. If we don’t appear as a threat, they won’t shoot at us. Follow me. Let’s hit the other side of the street and find an alley to get us out of here.”
Carl took his steps carefully, arcing out to the other side of the street while making a beeline for the big tree hanging over the street. As Carl had predicted, the shootout stayed confined to that property, and with the two young men taking incoming fire, the firefight soon was over.
“Not even neighborhoods are going to be safe,” Carl said. “The looters are going to start targeting houses. Let’s try finding a major highway.”
“Why? Aren’t we going to run into mobs there, too?” Preston asked.
“I don’t think so. They want things to burn down and smash. Overpasses and street lamps are going to become boring pretty quickly,” Carl said.
“Mister Carl? What happened? I don’t want to look,” Shyanne said, her face buried in Carl’s shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s better you don’t look at it.” It’s just more idiocy by grownups, Carl thought to himself. And thanks to grownups, this world is no longer safe for kids to grow up in.
Chapter Eleven
Pow! The loud sound of the latest gunshot sent another jolt to Tara’s back teeth. The horror that she and Michael were using live rounds on human beings had faded long ago. Now it was a running battle for survival. Tara clung to the bed of the pickup truck while Michael squeezed off his shot. Ahead of them, several paces away, another man dropped to the ground, the bat in his hand dropping next to him.
The rest of the mob behind him hesitated. Tara ground her teeth. “Dammit,” she whispered, “Get a clue you assholes and get the hell out of here! Do you really want to die?”
During their flight up this boulevard, Tara and Michael had kept shooting their rifles at their pursuers, hoping the mob would give up and turn back. Tara personally had witnessed body after body hit the asphalt. Her first shot had been difficult. She was not targeting an animal in her scope, but a human being. But she realized the man advancing on her likely would hack, beat or slash her to death, possibly after he horribly violated her.
So she took the shot, and her first target fell.
That realization kept her on her toes, and for this past hour, she and Michael had been fleeing up this boulevard, shooting and moving when the mob of anarchists hesitated. After their flight up the
boulevard, Tara and Michael took cover behind a tall truck. Then Michael fired while Tara loaded a new cartridge into her rifle.
Suddenly, a beer bottle flew toward the truck. Tara cringed, but it deflected off the right-side window before it could reach the pair. Glass and liquid sprayed across the vehicle and street, narrowly missing the top of Michael’s boots.
Michael raised his rifle and nearly squeezed the trigger again, but as he looked into the scope he froze. “It looks like they’re pulling back,” he said, his mouth dry. “I think we can make a break for it.”
Tara turned around. There was an intersection up ahead under dangling street lights that were no longer functional. The right turn at the intersection offered a possible escape route. Better yet, the right lane of this boulevard was clogged with stalled automobiles. They could take cover alongside the vehicles all the way to the turnoff.
Michael stood from his crouched position. “Let’s run. Now!”
Tara and Michael took off across the sidewalk, ducking down once they reached the vehicles. Occasionally, Michael would turn around to see if the mob was giving chase, but each time he turned back and kept pace with Tara. Their pursuers finally had thrown in the towel.
Tara and Michael finally crossed onto the intersecting street, revealed as Westphalen Street by the nearby street sign. After a while, Tara got the sense that their backs weren’t being viciously targeted, but she fought the urge to slow down, to rest, to lower her guard. She just couldn’t make herself believe that crazed men with clubs and bottles weren’t just behind her, trying to kill her.
In the end, it was her tired legs that cut her flight short. Her sprint decreased to a jog, which quickly slowed to a labored walk. Heaviness gripped her chest. She turned around and discovered Michael looked even worse. He was several paces behind her, sweat dripping from his face and hair, with only a loose grip on his rifle. Only the strap around his neck held the weapon steady.
Silent Interruption (Book 1): Silent Interruption Page 8