by Payne, T. L.
Seeking Refuge
Gateway to Chaos Series, Book Two
Copyright © 2020 by T. L. Payne
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Deranged Doctor Design
Edited by Mia Darien at LKJ Books & Freelancing
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
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
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Also by T. L. Payne
About the Author
Chapter 1
Red Cross Disaster Shelter
Chesterfield Mall
Chesterfield, Missouri
February 18th
Raine Caldwell was seated on a mattress on the floor with her back up against the wall, reading a well-worn copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, when a fight broke out between two women at the other end of the room. Raine tucked a strand of dark brown hair behind her ear, dog-eared her page, and looked up.
“Someone stole my purple nail polish,” a thirty-something woman dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans yelled, waving a cosmetics bag over her head. She and another woman exchanged angry words then suddenly, the older woman dove over a cot and tackled a twenty-something woman to the floor. A large group of onlookers gathered around, cheering them on. The crowd seemed to enjoy watching the two women wrestle.
A moment later, two guards rushed in and broke up the fight, taking both women with them when they left the room. To where, Raine didn’t know. It hadn’t been the first such outburst she’d witnessed since she’d arrived at the Red Cross shelter four days earlier. Several women had been hauled away and hadn’t returned.
Tensions were running high. Everyone’s patience was wearing thin as the days dragged on with uncertainty as to when they’d be able to leave. Seemingly little things could set someone off. Raine didn’t know how much more of this any of them could take. She’d heard there had been a few serious injuries reported in the men’s quarters.
The day before, Raine had thought she’d heard Antonio Milanesi’s voice coming from the men’s quarters on the lower level of the building. She’d asked one of the volunteers to check the roster, but it seemed that privacy issues forbade the release of information about any of the other guests.
Instead, like a lot of the shelter’s other residents, Raine had left a message for him on the wall outside the food court. It had been sad reading all the messages from people searching for their friends and loved ones. Particularly hard were the parents looking for their children. Raine hoped that if Antonio had made it to the shelter, he’d see her message and let her know he’d made it. She hoped too that somehow even Tom and Gage had found their way there.
Raine placed her book on her mat and crossed her arms over her chest.
Eight days. It had been eight whole days since the lights went out. Raine Caldwell had been at the Red Cross shelter located inside the abandoned Chesterfield Mall for four of those days. She was climbing the walls. Raine had been hopeful after speaking to Sheena Brown that they’d soon be getting out of there. Sheena had been informed that the Red Cross and FEMA were planning to start moving people into trailers outside the city, and Sheena had put in a request to have Raine live with her and her son, DeAndre.
Although the idea of getting out of the shelter had lifted her mood, what Raine really wanted was to get home to Florida. With her apartment and the university burned down, there was nothing left for her in St. Louis. Raine didn’t understand why the shelter officials couldn’t tell her when they’d be able to provide transportation to get her home. She thought it made better sense to get her home to Florida than support her in a FEMA trailer for who knew how long. But, if the two men that had arrived that morning were to be believed, no one was leaving the shelter anytime soon. From what Raine had overheard them say, the National Guard wasn’t even allowing people to leave the city.
How could they do that? Wasn’t this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?
She wrapped her arms around herself.
Raine wasn’t feeling free or brave at that moment. She was having a difficult time feeling anything but trepidation. Since the moment she’d left the safety of her apartment, she’d felt an overwhelming panic. When they’d arrived at the WashU campus and discovered it deserted, Raine had thought she’d reached her breaking point, but that hadn’t been the case. Even with all that had occurred while getting to the safety of the Red Cross shelter, she’d somehow held it together. Raine reached up and fiddled with her diamond-studded nose ring. She rubbed a hand across her brow and sighed, puffing out her checks and letting out a harsh breath.
This…sitting around waiting—not knowing what was going on outside the shelter, with the country, or in Florida where her mother was—felt like it’d break her.
All the stores had abandoned the Chesterfield Mall sometime before Raine had moved to St. Louis. She’d never seen it when the carousel ride still ran and shoppers filled the stores. Now, all the merchandise was gone, and the shops were filled with cots for people who’d fled their homes following the electromagnetic pulse and cyber-attack that had plunged the city and probably the nation into the dark ages. Each floor of the two-story mall had a couple of dayrooms where folding chairs lined the walls and two rows of chairs ran down the center. A few folding tables had been set up for board games or puzzles. A volunteer pushed a library cart filled with well-worn books around the room. There weren’t enough to go around and the best books were usually taken by the time the cart made it to Raine’s end of the building.
After breakfast that morning, Raine had gone to the dayroom and tried to chat up one of the volunteers, but the middle-aged woman was less than friendly. She’d only tell Raine that the staff hadn’t been briefed on the plan to relocate the refugees. Refugees. Was she now considered a refugee in her own country? She supposed that was true in that her home was likely in ashes, but she had somewhere to go. She had a family—at least a mother and aunt. They’d be worried about her.
Although she’d read all the books on the cart, Raine pretended to be interested as the elderly volunteer summarized the available reading material.
“Do you know how long it’ll be before they start moving us out of the shelter?” Raine asked the volunteer. The gray-haired woman gave her a blank stare.
“They don’t tell me anything,” she finally said as she pushed the cart toward the door.
Raine plopped onto a folding chair and stretched out her legs. She looked up at the ceiling as she tried to calm her frustration.
“They aren’t going to tell us the truth, you know,” a twenty-something man in a dark gray hoodie said from behind her.
Raine sat up and turned in her chair.
“They aren’t saying anything. They aren’t even attempting to tell us what’s going on,” she said.
“The FEMA folks are the ones you need to corner. They have all the answers here. Those people,” he said, pointing to two older women in Red Cross vests handing out board games, “they don’t know anything more than we do. But it’s telling that the folks that do know haven’t kept us informed. I think they know we aren’t going to like the answers.”
“Why can’t they just give us the basics—lie, even—just tell us that they’re working on getting us out of here at least?” Raine asked.
“They don’t want to cause a panic. You’re going to see a shitstorm when folks discover that life is not going back to normal anytime soon. Eventually, the shelter will run out of food and water as well as fuel for the massive generators that are powering this place.”
Raine told the man what she’d overheard that morning about the National Guard not allowing anyone to leave the city.
“That figures. They don’t want nearly a million people flooding the countryside,” he said.
Raine rubbed her hands on her thighs. “I don’t understand how they could do that. Wouldn’t they have to feed everyone then?”
He shrugged.
“They might try, but they're gonna run out eventually.”
Raine’s legs began to bounce up and down.
“How much longer do you think we have before that happens?”
The man stood and rolled his shoulders, then ran his fingers through his short, black hair. He was tall and fit. His hoodie was stretched tight across his chest, and he wore black jogger pants and running shoes. He walked around the bank of chairs and sat down across from Raine. He leaned over, placed his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands together. Raine leaned forward in her chair. She studied his handsome features. When their eyes locked, she looked down at her boots.
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
“Raine. Raine Caldwell.”
He lifted his chin. “I’m Brandon Winters... Well, Raine, I’d say they’re getting close to running out of everything. There’s, like, six or eight hundred people here now. That’s something like fourteen or fifteen thousand MREs they’ve gone through already. With transportation down, how would they restock the food supply? They’ve closed all the bathrooms here on the upper floor already, so they’re having water pressure issues, I’d imagine. I mean, how long is the water treatment plant going to run on backup generators?”
Raine chewed on her thumbnail as she thought about the water issue. She was surprised the water had flowed this long. She looked up at Brandon, trying to conceal her panic.
“You think the water treatment plant is running on generators? Wouldn’t that take massive amounts of fuel?”
“Yeah, but I imagine they stored a certain amount of fuel for emergencies, but maybe nothing like this. With all the cars and trucks not working, maybe there’s a lot more available,” Brandon said.
Raine shrugged.
“Still, it won’t last forever, and neither will the food. At some point, they’re going to just close the doors and we’ll all be on our own and shit out of luck,” Brandon said.
A silence fell between them.
“You got family with you?” Brandon asked.
Raine leaned back in her chair and stared at him. She wasn’t sure how much personal information she should be sharing with strangers at this point. She shook her head, not seeing the harm in acknowledging it.
“Mine are back in Georgia. I was on my way home from my sister’s wedding out in Colorado when my car just stopped in the middle of the interstate,” Brandon said. “I was supposed to fly but my flight got canceled. Kinda glad it did now.”
Raine sighed. “Guess none of us are getting home anytime soon.”
Brandon shook his head. “Where are you from?”
“Florida,” Raine said. “I’m here for school.”
“You’re a long way from home too, then.” Brandon said as he stood. “I’ll see you around, Florida.”
Raine stared up at him. “Yeah. See you, Georgia.”
Raine sighed and looked up at the ceiling. Time was now an enemy. She had too much idle time for her mind to run wild. She wasn’t sleeping well. Her dreams were filled with the horrible scenes from her journey to the shelter. Images replayed over and over in her mind of Rodney lying dead in the doorway of the golf pro shop, Brice’s last moments before he died from a knife wound to his abdomen, and the look in the eyes of the man Raine shot outside Janice’s fallout shelter. Her imagination ran rampant with what might have happened to Elle, Tom, Gage, Antonio, and Stella—all of whom had started the journey with her from their apartment but hadn’t made it to the shelter.
Raine was suffering under the weight of overwhelming guilt. Many of her companions hadn’t made it while she had. Her counselor would call that survivor’s guilt. She’d explained the phenomena to her following the death of Raine’s older brother, David, but knowing what it was called didn’t make it go away and didn’t change the fact that they were all gone. Having nothing but time on her hands to think about it only made it one hundred times worse.
Normally, Raine dealt with negative emotions by staying occupied with constructive activities. The pre-med program at Washington University had kept her very busy the last year and a half. The plan was to finish her undergraduate at WashU, get into medical school, then after graduation, go into research to find a cure for Ewing’s sarcoma. That was how she’d honor her brother.
How long would it be before life returned to normal and she could move forward with her plans? She needed an answer to that question. Just sitting there among strangers was driving her crazy. Raine weighed her options. She hated not having control over her own life and circumstances. The way she saw it, she was screwed. She had no transportation. It was a balmy twelve degrees outside, so hiking home to Florida was off the table. It had snowed every day, and the roads would be covered, making walking nearly impossible.
Brandon’s words played over and over in Raine’s mind as she stood and walked out of the room. Would they just close the doors and leave them to fend for themselves? Then what would she do? What could she do? Raine knew one thing for sure—she needed to be prepared for it if they did. She needed a plan.
Chapter 2
The Ward Farm
Possum Hollow Road
St. Francois County, Missouri
February 18th
Following a gunfight that had left an elderly man dead in his field, Scott Kincaid and JJ Durham had committed to making sure that his widow made it safely to a relative’s house in St. Louis. Four days later, Scott was still committed to the task, but he was sure that if not for the snowstorms, JJ would’ve abandoned the mission. He was also anxious to get on the road to Florida, but they’d brought death and destruction to the woman’s doorstep, and he wouldn’t abandon her. He couldn’t. That just wasn’t who he was.
Scott leaned over the fender of Mr. Ward’s old Jeep Grand Cherokee and listened as JJ turned the key.
“Give it more gas,” Scott yelled over the sound of the coughing, sputtering engine before it died again.
After another unsuccessful attempt to start the Jeep, Scott released JJ from her duty and set about cleaning the spark plugs in the hopes of getting the old car on the road before the day was done. If they got on the road before noon, they’d be in St. Louis by two that afternoon. The snow on the roads would slow them down, stretching the normal one-hour drive out to a couple of hours. In any case, he could drop JJ off at her folks’ place down near Marble Hill by dinner. If he drove all night, he could be in Montgomery, Alabama, by morning and possibly to Tallahassee, Florida, by noon.
The thought that he could have lunch with his daughter the next day caused him to be even more anxious
to get the vehicle running. He wasn’t the best mechanic around. He’d tinkered with cars as a teen, back when he didn’t have much money and could only afford to drive old clunkers, but he’d have to admit, he really didn’t know how to diagnose many mechanical problems.
After working on it for countless hours over the past few days, Scott had exhausted his knowledge and was still unable to get the car to start. He’d even resorted to reading the owner’s manual. Knowing that the compact SUV had Quadra-Trac four-wheel drive made him feel even more confident that it would get the job done and get them safely to St. Louis and back. Once he dropped JJ off at her folks’ place and got out of Missouri, it was likely he wouldn’t have to deal with any more snow—if only he could get the darn thing started.
Frustrated and downcast, he entered the kitchen to warm up a bit before tackling the issue again.
“How about some coffee, Scott? That will help warm you up,” Mrs. Ward asked as she pulled a gingham apron over her head.
“Thank you, Mrs. Ward, I’d love some,” Scott said as he stuck a stick of wood into the stove.
As Mrs. Ward poured coffee into a mug, Scott took a seat at the table. He ran a hand across his stubbled chin. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d shaved. He had lost track of how many days it had been since the lights went out.
“Are you still having trouble getting that old Jeep started?” Mrs. Ward asked as she placed the mug in front of Scott.