by Mike Kraus
“What… what happened here?” Dianne whispered to herself, scarcely able to believe her eyes. The bodies of at least four individuals were strewn across the floor in front of the nurses station, the smell from their rotting flesh stinging Dianne’s eyes and the back of her throat. Two appeared to be wearing nurse uniforms while one lying on his back near an overturned wheelchair looked like he was a patient. A fourth body wearing a police uniform was across the room near a wall with a pistol on the ground nearby.
The grey flooring was soaked through with blood and other bodily fluids that had leaked from the corpses and soaked into the carpet. Dianne slowly realized that the fluid mixture must have been causing the stains she had seen elsewhere on the carpet in the hallway, though she hadn’t seen any bodies lying in the hall.
After dry heaving for a moment and taking a long drink of water to try and wash down the bile Dianne pulled her shirt up over her mouth and nose and stepped gingerly through the carnage. She saw two more bodies behind the nurses station, both with bandannas over their faces and white undershirts that had been stained with blood. One of the figures was on his face while the other was on his back, the handle of a pistol-grip shotgun still in his hand.
The more Dianne saw of the bodies and how they were laid out, the more she began to ignore the smell and gore and focus on deducing what had happened. At first she thought that it was a simple robbery gone wrong, but after stepping behind the nurses station and picking up a logbook she found on the desk, she saw that the situation was far more complicated—and horrifying—than she first imagined. Someone—one of the nurses or doctors from the looks of it—had kept a record of what had happened on the day of the event and for the four days following.
***
- Something happened earlier. Giant explosions in the parking lot and in the streets. Almost everyone’s car went up in flames. Dr. Landrum and a couple of the nurses from upstairs left, said they needed to walk home to their families. The Internet’s down, phones aren’t working and the TV just cut out. What’s going on??
- A couple of people showed up to pick up their relatives. They were armed and didn’t want to answer any questions. Another one showed up after that, said The BBQ place down the street’s up in flames. A couple of the apartment towers downtown are smoking pretty badly. Saw a plane going down near the airport, hard. We’re all talking about leaving but there are too many people here.
- The fires are unbelievable. We seem to be safe for the moment, but it’s like hell on earth out there. Emergency generator’s half out of fuel, or that’s what the pair who went to check on it said. Couple of cops showed up earlier in a beat-up cruiser. One of them was hurt pretty bad from a gunshot to his gut. His partner told us it’s anarchy in the streets. All the doors are locked and we’ve consolidated the patients to this floor so we’re okay for now.
- Fires are dying down but there’s still a bunch of smoke and ash in the air. Generator went down in the middle of the night and we lost six. The police officer’s partner was one of them. There’s no power for the refrigeration units so not sure what to do.
- Another five went last night. We’re running out of what we need to keep them alive. Two more cops showed up, armed to the teeth. Rough shape. Said looters are running rampant.
- Saw an ambulance out in the street, lights flashing. It stopped and a few people got out and started running up. Cops met them at the door and one of them went down. They killed a few of the people but there are more coming.
- Why oh why no no no more dying, lots of gunshots
- Holed up upstairs but they’re down a floor below. They want drugs and we’re mostly out. Only a few bags left but they’re not happy with that. They’re shooting patients trying to make us give them what we don’t have. One officer alive. He’s going to try something he said is crazy and stupid. I hope we make it out.
***
The rest of the pages were illegible, a mixture of scrawled and smeared pen along with droplets of dried blood. Dianne closed the book and looked at the bodies on the floor. “So they were trapped here, trying to take care of the patients when you idiots arrived and started shooting the place up so that you could get high?” She shook her head. “I wonder if there’s anyone still alive here?”
She hurried away from the nurses station and stopped at the first room down the hall. She opened it slowly, keeping her gun at the ready, when she was nearly bowled over by more foul odors than she had already experienced. Already overwhelmed by the sight and smells outside the nurses station she barely managed to pull down her shirt off of her face before vomiting onto the floor. Dianne wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her jacket and took a hasty drink of water before looking for the source of the fresh odor.
Inside the room, lying on the two beds that were sitting next to each other, were the bodies of a man and woman that had been dead for more than a few days. They were dressed in plain off-white clothes that had the appearance of being standard issue for patients in the facility. Dianne realized with no small amount of horror that the patients must have died after the event, either from lack of medication or food, from injuries inflicted by the looters or something even worse.
Was anyone alive to take care of you people? Dianne choked down more water, fighting the urge to vomit again as she closed the door. She checked several more rooms along the hall, finding similar scenes in each of them. In some the patients had been in their beds when they died. In others the doors had been jammed from the inside, but she could see through the window on the door that a few patients had crawled out of their beds and died near the door, either trying to keep it closed to keep out the looters or because they had been trying to escape.
The more rooms Dianne checked the more she grew used to the sights and smells and by the time she reached the end of the hall she was convinced she knew what had happened. “They couldn’t get out of the city after the fires broke out, so they hunkered down here. Probably their best move at the time but they couldn’t have accounted for the looters. A few cops happened to show up and fought with the looters but it looks like most everyone involved died. With no doctors or nurses to take care of the patients they died too.” Dianne tried not to think about what life must have been like for the staff and patients at the facility in the final few days and focused instead on the job at hand.
“Jason’s still alive and still needs help. I need to see if I can find anything that the looters didn’t manage to carry off before all of this went down.” Dianne continued talking to herself as she headed back to the nurses station. She searched through the notebooks, folders and paperwork there until she found a laminated sheet that had a list of floor and room numbers along with some names that looked familiar. After rolling up her sleeve and comparing some of what was listed on the sheet to the names of the medications Dianne had written on her arm she headed back towards the stairwell, ready to ascend to the next floor. She didn’t know if what someone had written in the logbook about running out of medications applied to what she was looking for but she finally had a good lead on where to potentially find them.
Dianne stopped on the landing of the staircase briefly, taking a moment to savor the relatively fresh air and try to clear her mind of the images she had seen on the second floor. She looked out into the city, finding a measure of peace in the stillness of the devastation when a hint of movement caught her eye. She looked down the hill, near where she had last seen the hatchback, and saw—passing behind a cluster of buildings—the glint of red, silver and green. She froze in place as she watched the area until she finally located the source of the movement.
Three vehicles stopped along the street behind the hatchback and a dozen people got out of the SUV and two sedans. Most of them milled around while two went up to the hatchback. Dianne scrambled to get her rifle up to her shoulder and she focused her scope on the hatchback. Two men—the same two that had been chasing her—stood near the hatchback talking to a woman and a man who had arrived in the new vehicles.
Their conversation was animated and one of the men from the hatchback pointed at the LTAC facility. The other three turned and looked at it, nodding in some sort of agreement. The pairs broke up after that and the entire group of people began moving through the city, fanning out as they approached the building.
“Oh, come on!” Dianne shook her head in frustration, shouting at no one in particular. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Chapter 15
Somewhere in Northern Virginia
Rick peeked out from beneath the overpass, grimacing at the dark clouds still roiling overhead. “When on earth is this going to let up?” He sighed, walked back over to the car and sat down on the hood next to Jane. Dr. Evans was sprawled out on a small rise in the concrete, a rolled-up jacket tucked under his head as he tried to catch a few minutes of sleep. Thunder boomed, rain crashed and hail thudded against the overpass above, but the trio and their vehicle were safe and dry under its protection.
After crossing over the Ohio River they had driven through the night and the rest of the next day, stopping only for a few hours in the evening to rest and warm up some food over a fire. The rest of the night was spent driving again as they took turns making their way across wide highways and single-lane backwoods roads. The storm had rolled in from the west in the late morning, as they were crossing over the state line between West Virginia and Virginia.
Rick took charge of the driving at that point, keeping them going at a steady clip through the rain and lighting until the hail started to get dense and forceful enough to force them to pull over and find shelter. The car’s rooftop solar panels were designed to stand up to the harshest weather conditions but Rick knew full well that they wouldn’t be able to last long in a hailstorm no matter how well they were designed.
Finding the overpass had been a stroke of luck given that none of the group wanted to travel any farther into a city than necessary. With nothing around except for open fields and winding highways, the spot provided safety and security while simultaneously ensuring that they couldn’t easily be snuck up on.
The storm continued raging on for a full hour before it began to die down. As soon as the hail gave way to rain Rick was back behind the wheel, ready to get them going again. Jane and Dr. Evans were less enthusiastic about resuming their trip given that they had spent more hours than they wanted to think about crammed together in what felt like a shoebox on wheels.
“Have I mentioned,” Jane said as she squirmed in the back seat. “That I hate this car? Because I do. I really do.”
“I think you’ve brought it up once or twice, yeah.” Rick laughed as he pulled out from beneath the overpass and accelerated along the highway. “Look on the bright side, though. We’re almost to Washington. Once we get there we’ll be out of the car. Of course we’ll be digging through what very well may be the rubble of the USA’s foremost spy agency trying to find a way into their systems to get the access key that will let us issue a shutdown command to the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever developed.”
“I’d rather stay in the car, if that’s an option.” Dr. Evans deadpanned his response and Jane couldn’t help but shake her head and chuckle.
“Boy, you two really know how to show a girl a good time. Do we get to have more gunfights, too?”
Rick shook his head, his response more serious than not. “I sure hope not. We’ve barely got any firepower.”
“Rick?” Dr. Evans was leaning forward, staring intently at the sky through the windshield. “I may be hallucinating. Can you look up at the sky and tell me what you see?”
Rick lifted his foot off the accelerator and leaned forward as well. He scanned the sky for a moment, not immediately seeing what Dr. Evans was talking about. When he did, though, he gasped in shock. “Is that…”
“A plane? Yes. Yes it is. A Russian plane. A Tupolev Tu-95, if I’m not terribly mistaken.”
“Dr. Evans?” Rick brought the car to a halt and they all stared at the silver plane soaring through the sky. “Why is there a Russian plane flying over Washington?”
“It’s more than a Russian plane. It’s actually a bomber. A long-range bomber.”
“Sweet mother of mercy.” Rick whispered, swallowing hard to push down the lump in his throat. “How do you know?”
“I used to be obsessed with model aircraft. The Bear—that’s the ninety-five’s NATO reporting name—is an older bomber, originally flown in the fifties.”
“Is it… going down?” Jane watched the aircraft tilt slightly to the side as it continue heading from east to west, somehow growing larger the farther it traveled.
“Holy crap, yes it is.” The tires of the car squealed in protest as Rick pulled the vehicle around to head west and follow the plane’s path.
“You want to chase it?!” Jane shouted from the back seat. “It’s crashing!”
“Maybe!” Rick replied, dividing his attention between the road and the plane. “Or maybe they’re trying to land it nearby! It’s people, though, possibly from a government agency.”
“Russians, though! Not exactly our friends!” Jane shouted.
“I think you’ll find that anyone not actively shooting at us could be considered our friend.” Dr. Evans glanced back at Jane. “Besides, whoever has the resources to send a plane to the other side of the globe may also have resources that can aid us in stopping this global threat. Maybe they’re even here to try and do what we’re doing.”
Rick shook his head and slowed the car back down. “Not like that they’re not; watch!” He pointed out the window as the plane took a steep dive downward, plummeting toward the ground like a wounded bird. For a split second, as it vanished behind some buildings in the distance, Rick wondered if the pilots on board had managed to pull up. The massive ball of black smoke and fire shot down Rick’s faint hope.
“So much for that, then.” Dr. Evans slumped back in his seat.
“You’re sure it was a Russian plane?” Rick watched as the smoke rose into the sky and the orange flames began to fade away.
“One-hundred percent. Perhaps someone parachuted out of the plane earlier in the flight?”
Rick shrugged and slowly turned the car around once again. “Maybe. They would have been coming out of that storm not too long ago. I wonder if that tore them up and downed them. Can you imagine trying to parachute out in something like that?”
“Guys, I hate to butt in, but can we talk about how weird it is that a Russian plane potentially dropped Russian soldiers into Washington?” Jane leaned forward from the back seat. “Is no one thinking about what that could mean?”
It was Dr. Evans’ turn to shrug. “We don’t know that the plane was carrying soldiers or that anyone made it out before it crashed. You are right about one thing, though. It’s incredibly odd to see a Bear flying over Washington. The reasons for them being here are myriad and, frankly, none of them make that much sense.”
“So what should we do?”
Rick answered this time, his expression hardened into a mask of determination as he drove them towards the city. “We do what we set out to do. If someone else is here to do the same thing then we work with them. If they’re not… well, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
Author’s Notes
November 8, 2017
Hi there! If you’re reading this then you’ve made it to the end of episode 8 of Surviving the Fall and I can’t thank you enough for coming along on this awesome journey. As you can probably tell we’re entering the final stages of the story and it’s probably only going to be a few more books before everything is done. There’s still a lot of ground to cover, though, and things are going to be intense both for Dianne and Rick.
When planned out Dianne’s final story arc, I wanted something that would showcase her willingness to do anything for her loved ones as well as how fed up she is with putting up with the nonsense she and her family are going through. When she shot the intruder who was repeatedly trespassing on her farm and trying to break into
her house and barns she was merely defending her family and property. Tina’s capture and Jason’s wounding have made it all too clear that their enemy is willing to do anything. Now she has to do the same.
When I write about the motivations and actions of both heroes and foes in my stories I try to keep it relatively grounded. Writing about a fictional overlord who rises to power in a wasteland and amasses an army or a hero who manages to put together his own large fighting force is a trope that’s been done more times than not. I like to keep things more personal and down to earth, at least on some levels. That’s why Dianne and her kids were completely alone at their house for the first chunk of the story and why there are only three other people there with them now.
That smaller, more intimate and personal feeling of survival is something I find supremely interesting. Imagining and even acting out what you might do in a situation like is occurring in Surviving the Fall is something I find to be both a good thought exercise and something that’s fun, too. If Dianne and her kids were part of a large collective of random people who banded together then the stakes, in my opinion, would be lower. Right now they’re living on the edge, surviving because of their own personal preparedness and forethought. If they were part of a larger collective then I think it wouldn’t be quite as interesting.
I debated for a while about whether I wanted Rick to have traveling companions on his journey home or not. If you’ll recall, in the first part of the story Rick met a couple of people in Los Angeles who traveled with him briefly but the pair was ultimately gunned down in front of Rick. The point I wanted to hammer home there was that the world in this story is brutal. It’s unexpected. Bad things do happen, even to people who do nothing wrong. Forcing Rick to travel alone didn’t quite feel right, though. For one thing it would be difficult for him to figure out everything about Damocles on his own. Enter Jane and Dr. Evans. Two characters who became unlikely friends and one of which has a personal connection to Rick thanks to the events of Las Vegas.