Solar Reboot

by Matthew D. Hunt

  “You don’t touch him,” said Cameron. “That was the deal.”

  “He stole—”

  “I was right here. Doesn’t matter. You don’t touch him.”

  It was more than a desire for some kind of civil justice that drove Cameron to make her stand. She’d fought with Wade—just sparring, but plenty of it. He had a streak of something, something she recognized from the service. It wasn’t a mean streak, exactly, but something less emotional. She knew if he got his hands on Hernando, he’d take the kid apart.

  Bettie moved, and for a second Cameron thought she was going for Wade. But she strode right up to Hernando and slapped him right across the face.

  “You damn fool!” she shouted. “What in the sam hell were you thinking?”

  Hernando blinked at her, rubbing his cheek. He opened his mouth, and for one second, Cameron thought he was actually going to answer. But then his gaze slid past her, locking on Cameron and Wade. His face hardened.

  “Like I’m gonna say crap to these two. They already made up their minds about me.”

  “You’ll explain whatever we want you to, punk!” said Wade.

  “Wade, enough.” Cameron sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Hernando, you’re on half rations. And you’re on the same work schedule as Gina for a week.”

  “Yo, what?” said Hernando. “She killed someone. I get the same treatment?”

  “For a week,” said Cameron. “Gina’s on until we decide otherwise. You want to complain? Don’t take people’s shit.”

  She went to him and took the camera, then turned to put it in Wade’s hands. She searched his face until he finally met her gaze.

  “We’re done here,” she told him.

  He snorted. For one second his eyes flitted to Hernando before darting away. Then he turned on his heel and marched off. Cameron watched him go, hoping that was the end of it, knowing somehow that it wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 26

  It turned out that Alex didn’t need to do any bargaining at all. Graham went and spoke to the other family, the ones who’d come briefly to visit when Alex and Piper first arrived. When Graham returned, he had the keys to a car. It was a beat-up old ’93 Toyota Camry, its heater didn’t work, and one of its rear doors wouldn’t unlock. But Alex didn’t care about any of that, since it had four wheels and would roll on them. The gift left him with a hefty load of guilt, and he swore up and down he’d return to the reservation and repay them as soon as he could. Graham nodded and accepted the promise, but he regarded Alex with a cool expression. Alex wondered if the man really believed him.

  He spent some time studying a Thomas Guide before they set out on the road, and planned a winding route that would take them about a hundred miles north of Spokane. Alex still wasn’t willing to get within sight of a city. He shuddered to think what they must be like by now—all the same situations he’d seen out in the open country, but playing out on narrow streets chock full of humanity. No. No, they’d give Spokane a wide berth.

  Just as they were loading up the car and getting ready to go, Willow appeared from the garage lugging something big. As soon as he saw it, Alex ran to help—but as soon as it was in his hands, he paused and studied it. It was some kind of hand pump, with about a dozen feet of hose and a main unit that was bigger than his head.

  “For gas,” said Willow. “You should need about four tanks to get where you’re going, but you’ve been on the road—gas stations are going to be abandoned. You can use this to take it from their ground wells. I hope you know how to work it?”

  “I can figure it out,” said Alex. “And thank you.”

  Her gaze drifted over his shoulder to where Piper was waiting in the car, sheltering from the rain. “Just make sure you get home safely.”

  They set off with Alex feeling better than when they’d arrived, but with a new worry: with half of Piper’s meds lost in the flash flood, he was concerned they might not have enough to finish the trip. But he was out of any ideas about how to get more. Any big stores were likely to be taken over like the All-N-All they’d visited earlier. Small towns seemed a risky proposition—they might be like Broadus, or they might be full of paranoid country folk who were dang proud of their impressive gun collections, and Denny wasn’t there to give his recommendation or advice. Alex resolved to keep an eye out for any place that might have more meds, and in the meantime to press on as quickly as he could, in hopes of reaching the cabins before they ran out.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t able to move nearly as fast as he wanted. The storms weren’t quite as bad as they’d been under the bridge a few days ago, but they were close. He didn’t feel comfortable at anything above half highway speed, for fear that any slight tap on the brakes would send them careening off the road again. And slow going meant less fuel efficiency, so their gas problem would be even worse than he’d planned.

  On the first day, he called it quits at the apex of their northward journey, just across a lake the map said was called Pend Oreille and within sight of a town called Sandpoint. He didn’t risk driving into the town, and made sure they parked overnight on a very, very high piece of land—he wasn’t taking any chances of another flood making things any worse than they already were.

  They slept an uncomfortable night in the car—or at least Alex did. Piper climbed in the back seat and curled up with her head on Max’s belly. The dog’s presence eased Alex’s mind a bit. No one was going to sneak up on the car while Max was in it. But no matter how far he leaned back his seat, no matter how he twisted and turned, he couldn’t force his body to drift off until well into the night, and he woke early in the morning feeling supremely unrested.

  The first thing he did was drive along Sandpoint’s outskirts looking for a gas station. He found one at last, a non-chain joint that was probably locally owned. No one challenged them when he parked next to the ground tanks. A socket wrench and crowbar got the manhole-like cover off, and he found the insert point for the pump easily enough. The hand crank clearly wasn’t well-used, and his arms had begun to burn by the time he finally saw the liquid passing through the pipe. But the well was close to full, and soon the car’s tank was full. He had an extra little five-gallon canister, and he filled that too before tossing it in the trunk. Then they hit the road again.

  It was half an hour later before Alex realized that Piper hadn’t asked him about stealing the gas. The thought was a little disquieting, and he did his best to push it away.

  Piper asked for a bathroom break just before they stopped. She’d been taking them every few hours to change her pads, always an awkward and uncomfortable affair, seeing as how Alex still wasn’t willing to let her wander too far out of his sight, and the sudden dearth of publicly available restrooms. Now, though, they were in luck—as the sun set, they found another abandoned gas station, and this one had a toilet that didn’t make Piper want to puke when she saw it. As she ducked into the restroom, Alex repeated his performance with the station’s underground tank.

  But when he tried to pump it, nothing happened. Piper finished and returned to him, and still Alex hadn’t pumped so much as a drop into the car. Quickly he went to the other underground tanks and tried them, but they were all empty as well.

  He sat back on his heels, draping his arms over his knees, and gave a little snort of laughter. “Guess someone got paranoid and stocked up on fuel.”

  Piper shoved her hands in her pockets. She glanced at Max, who was poking his nose around the station’s dumpster not far away. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll sleep now and find another place in the morning, like we did today. It makes sense that someone would steal from the stations, but most of them won’t have been touched.”

  The next morning, however, he found that the opposite was true. It seemed the station he’d found in Sandpoint was an exception. He managed to trundle the car to five gas stations, but all of them had been drained dry. Finally, on the sixth, he found a ground tank that hadn’t been touched. He filled
the car and the extra canister, a flood of relief washing through him.

  “See?” he told Piper. “No sweat.”

  She didn’t look very reassured, and neither was Alex.

  As the day neared its end, Alex started pulling off the road every few miles to check the gas stations. But every one he checked was empty, except for a few that were jealously guarded by hard-eyed men with shotguns. Alex took one look and drove right by those, figuring it wasn’t worth the risk of trying to barter. Not that they had any supplies they could afford to trade, anyway.

  He went to sleep that night reassuring himself that he’d find another full station the next day. Morning proved him a liar. After trying every station within a reasonable distance, he set out on the 2 freeway heading west, his knuckles white on the wheel and a grim set to his jaw. Piper had to know what was wrong, but she remained mercifully silent.

  The car finally guttered and died just before noon, right after they’d passed a town called Reardan. They were in Washington. They’d crossed almost the entire country. But they still had a whole state to cross.

  Max paced around the car while Alex loaded up their supplies into two backpacks again. After all the times he’d had to do it on the trip, the routine came quickly, and it afforded him some extra attention to spend counting Piper’s meds. They were low. She’d be fine for now, but he’d have to find more long before they reached the cabins. If he didn’t, she’d never make it.

  Enough of that. He wouldn’t let himself go down that road. They’d handled everything they’d come across so far. He could get some stupid insulin. He would, because the alternative was unthinkable.

  Piper stood beside the trunk of the car, her hood up, her eyes lowered to the road. Alex caught her eye and gave her a smile.

  “You okay walking, princess?”

  She didn’t even roll her eyes. “Sure.”

  He went over to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Just for a little while. We’ll find something else, just like we have before—a car, a truck. Heck, maybe I’ll steal a bus. We’ll cruise up to the cabins in a tour bus. How about that?”

  It worked, but barely. Her lips summoned a quivering smile, but her eyes couldn’t quite join in. “Okay.”

  “All right. Feed Max before we go, huh? We can’t bring all his food with us, so we might as well let him fill up before we start off.”

  Piper nodded and went to do as he asked. When her back was turned and she was near the front of the car, he loaded up the pistol he’d taken from the cop car days ago, and shoved it in the back of his waistband.

  * * *

  Walking again brought back painful memories of Denny, but that was tempered by the fact that the storms were much lighter than usual. The road’s high elevation, combined with its well-built shoulders, meant they didn’t have to deal with mud or rough terrain as they walked. In fact they were practically on the road itself, which Alex would once have avoided, but now a total lack of people eased his mind.

  That changed when they saw a prison in the distance. It was far from the road but not quite far enough for Alex’s liking. At first he didn’t pay it too much mind; it wasn’t as though prisons were a rare sight in the countryside. But then he got to thinking, and he wondered what prisons must be like in the middle of this planetary reboot. The prisoners couldn’t possibly have been released. But what, then? Did the guards keep reporting for duty every day? He knew he wouldn’t be clocking in if he were them, with the whole social structure crumbling. Had the prisoners starved to death, with no one to let them out of their cells? Or, left to their own devices, had some of them managed to get out? Had they, perhaps, released the others?

  All these thoughts and more swirled around his mind, until he stopped even pretending to keep his gaze from the prison. Then, when the freeway turned and brought them around the other side of it, he saw something that chilled his heart: on the prison’s western side, the fence had been torn down. By what exactly, he didn’t know, but a big vehicle, certainly—a truck, maybe, or at least a prison van. The door leading into the prison itself was shut, but he doubted very much that it was locked.

  Piper didn’t seem to have noticed, and he’d be damned if he was going to bring it up only to freak her out. So he kept his mouth shut, and they pressed on until they saw another small town up ahead. Then Alex took them off the freeway and onto some smaller side country roads to wind their way around it. If he remembered correctly, the town was called Davenport. Whoever had broken out of the prison, he didn’t doubt they would have gone straight for the town. Maybe they’d snatched up some supplies and run along, but maybe not. Best to play it safe.

  When they made it back to the 2 without seeing another soul, Alex began to breathe easier. As the sun began to set, he led Piper and Max off the freeway. A small road led up a rise and into a thicket of oaks. Once under their boughs, he built their tent out of sight of the road. Piper dropped off almost immediately, but Alex lay awake a little while, listening to her breathing and the occasional rustling of Max outside. He felt a little bad leaving the dog in the rain, but the tent wasn’t big enough for all three of them, and he didn’t want to wake up to a load of crap dropped on the tent’s floor because he’d left the door closed all night.

  Sleep found him at last, and he woke to a grey dawn that promised the rain was coming back strong. Alex watched the sky distrustfully as they ate a meager breakfast and pressed on. As the heaviness of the rain began to steadily increase, he began to search for something, anything, to speed up the rest of the trip—or at least to ease it. Another vehicle would be ideal, but at this point he’d even have taken a pair of umbrellas—until he thought of fighting their wind resistance day and night, and tossed that away as a bad idea.

  The only pleasant part about any of it was the way Washington looked in the midst of all the rain. It was the beginning of summer, and already the state’s most beautiful time of year. Rain didn’t exactly make the day cheery, but weeks of it had caused an explosion of greenery that sometimes made him stop and stare in wonder. Wildflowers had sprung to life in such numbers that they covered some entire fields, and had even come burrowing up through cracks in the road—and without cars passing by to batter them back down into submission, the freeway itself had become a sparse garden tended by Nature’s hand. The lack of any passers by, whether on foot or in a vehicle, had been eerie and tiring. Now it made the whole experience surreal, and somehow more beautiful. It was as if he and Piper were being given a gift, a special glimpse at Earth after humanity had passed from it.

  The world didn’t need them, he suddenly realized. Or rather, he’d known that all his life—he was a park ranger, after all. He was no stranger to the ways of the wild. But now that simple fact, the adage of pioneers and outdoorsmen for all the centuries of America’s existence, was made clear and given tangible proof. His quest to return home to his wife had a new and invalidating perspective. Who cared if their family reunited? Who cared if humanity survived the flare at all? If it wasn’t the flare, it would be an asteroid, or humanity’s own industrial poisons, or their insane obsession with nuclear weapons.

  Someday they’d all be gone. Earth would still be here. It wouldn’t even notice.

  CHAPTER 27

  The rain grew steadily worse as the day wore on, and toward evening Alex began looking for a place to hole up for the night. At first he was only looking for a hill or a copse, but he found something much better: a barn in the middle of an open field. Its red walls sagged a bit, but they looked sturdy enough. A new-looking lock on the property’s gate told him it might be inhabited. But with luck, the ranchers would be holed up in their own home, or living on some other property, and wouldn’t notice a pair of weary refugees huddling in their barn for one night against the rain.

  They hopped the fence and made their way across the field towards the barn. Now they walked on mud, and it sucked at their feet like it was trying to make up for the days of clear road they’d had. But as they drew ne
ar the barn’s huge front door, Alex was drawn up short by a sudden sound from inside: the whinny of horses.

  On instinct, Alex’s hand darted in front of Piper to shield her, moments before his mind even registered what the sound had been. When he recognized it, he relaxed—and then he smiled.

  “Dad?” said Piper. “What is it?”

  “Horses in the barn,” said Alex. “I know it’s been a few years, but you remember how to ride one, right?”

  Piper frowned. “Sure, but …”

  She stopped and ducked her gaze. Maybe she’d been about to point out that the horses no doubt belonged to someone, and a horse could easily cost as much as a cheap used car. But Alex was grateful she didn’t finish the statement, because nothing was going to change his mind. Horses weren’t as fast as a car, but they were a heck of a lot faster than walking, and best of all he wouldn’t have to worry about fuel. The horses probably couldn’t go on grass forever, but they’d last the couple of days it would take to reach the cabins.

  The barn’s front door wasn’t locked—a chain hung in two loops, but it hung loose, with nothing securing it. Even a few days ago, that might have triggered alarm bells in Alex’s mind, but just now he was tired and could only think of Piper’s dwindling meds. He seized the handles of the door and wrenched it sideways.

  He didn’t see the shotgun butt until after it struck him in the forehead.

  Alex went crashing to the ground, stars dancing in his eyes. Piper screamed and threw herself over his body, protecting him with her arms. Max went berserk, standing in front of both of them and barking like hell. Alex blinked hard, trying to clear the spots in his vision.

  When they cleared, he saw his assailant. A black man, big, maybe six inches taller than Alex and well-muscled. He’d flipped the shotgun around to point it at them. And Alex’s stomach clenched as he saw the man’s orange jumpsuit, and handcuffs with a severed chain dangling from each wrist. A convict from the prison.