The Burst [A YA Apocalyptic EMP Survival Novel] (Barren Trilogy Book 1)

by Harley Vex

  “We should check out that center,” I said. “See if we can clean ourselves off.”

  “I need that,” Alana said.

  Still with my shotgun on my back, which I hadn’t even checked for bullets, we marched through the RV’s and to the center, peeking inside the windows.

  And lo-and-behold, there was a swimming pool inside, on the other end of a row of narrow glass windows.

  “Awesome.” Jerome bolted around the building, opening a door that wasn’t locked. We poured inside, removed the plastic suits, and dove into the cold water, clothes and all.

  “Relief,” Alana said, running her hand through her wet hair.

  “No kidding,” I said, glad to feel the grime and stress come off. The water was a good stress buster, and the cold helped to wake me up.

  Jerome splashed me, and I splashed him back as he laughed. I had to admit, this was also a good mental health moment. Even if it meant we were all getting dangerously close to each other.

  Once we had finished and I was shivering, we got out and found an entire rack of fluffy towels waiting. The retirees sure had comfort in mind, and it upset me that none of them had made it. We dried off, and once I’d stopped shivering, I knew we had to get back down to business. “We need to find more weapons. If David is in Colton, we’ll need to be prepared.”

  Alana gulped. “I’ve never shot a gun.”

  “I haven’t, either,” Jerome said.

  “I can show you. You just turn off the safety, hold it with both hands, and hold your breath,” I started, wringing out my shirt. “I’ve shot at a range before. We can start by searching the RVs of the people who died outside. I’m sure some of the old men have pistols, and probably some of the old women do, too.”

  “We should split up. That way, we can search faster,” Jerome said. “Let’s meet back here, at the pool.”

  We did that next after suiting up again and having a breakfast of energy bars. It was easy to tell who had died outside and which RVs they owned. No one had gotten far from their starting points when the radiation struck, it seemed. And we didn’t have to search for long. An RV filled with grandchild pictures also had a cabinet that held gun cases, and we opened them to find four different pistols, complete with ammo.

  “Yikes,” Alana said. “We’ll have to take these back to the pool, I suppose.” She looked away from the weapons.

  I took one, hating the cold, heavy feel of it in my hands. “I know. I hope we don’t have to use these, but they’ll be good to have and wave around if we need to.” My throat dried at the thought of having to even threaten someone, even David.

  But then I thought of what he’d done last night, and something in me hardened.

  Alana took another pistol, and I told her where the safety was. After she got it, we went outside, and I took a few minutes to figure out how to load the weapon.

  And then I fired off a practice shot at the window of the next RV.

  The gun reverberated as the sound pierced my ears. The window shattered. Alana jumped as I stopped the pistol from flying back into my face, and glass rained inward into the unoccupied RV.

  My ears rang. I had forgotten how loud these things were.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You should try it, just so you know how to do it.” David and the others had vacated this town by now, and there was no way they’d hear this from Colton.

  “Sheesh,” Alana said. “What else do you know how to do?”

  “Well, we went scuba diving once, and we did some hiking, so mostly that,” I admitted.

  Alana frowned and looked down at her weapon. “I don’t want to have to shoot.”

  I swallowed. “We might have to.” Darkness filled me as I spoke, and I hated it. The awful haze and chill that had filled the area seemed to have filled me, too. Or maybe it was already there before the disaster even struck. “I wish there was a better way, but David proved how dangerous he is last night.”

  As predicted, Jerome came running at the sound a few minutes later. He looked as if he could barely breathe through his plastic suit. “You two,” he said. “Glad you gave me a signal. I found something very interesting. You know how retired people have a thing about classic cars?”

  “Classic cars?” I asked, lowering the weapon.

  Jerome didn’t even bother to stare at the window. He motioned us back towards him, and toward a cluster of buildings that made up the small town of Rocky Falls. Thankfully, none of them had burned, though a black expanse of torched brush still smoked some distance behind it. The pueblo-style buildings were pretty resistant to flames, thanks to their building materials.

  “Yeah. There’s a small garage that way. And there’s this old car from the forties or something. And better yet, it starts.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jerome was right. There was a small garage, more of a giant awning, really, on the far end of the RV park. We took maybe fifteen minutes to walk over there, and it was clearly just seasonal parking and not even enclosed. A row of vehicles stood under the open garage, and most of them were newer fare like sedans, SUV’s, and the usual pickup trucks.

  But one near the end, a black car that looked like something straight from an old gangster movie, caught my attention.

  “Is that it?” I asked Jerome as we closed in.

  “Nice, isn’t it? Found the keys in the guard shack,” he said, pointing at a large shack near another entrance to the RV park. “I think it belonged to the guard working inside. Had to pull them out of his pocket.”

  I swallowed, knowing what Jerome meant. “So he was a classic car fan.”

  “I think it’s a Ford,” Jerome said. “I didn’t catch its make for sure. I just know that it works, and it survived the burst.”

  My heart soared. We had a car. No longer did we need to pedal the bikes and waste precious calories. I ran up to the model and ran my hand down the sleek body. “This isn’t one of those hand crank ones, is it?”

  “Not at all,” Jerome said. “It’s not that old. And that’s good, because I’d have the job of starting it, being the guy.” He opens the driver's side door and grins. “I guess not everything is bad. We might not even have to stop in Colton.”

  A pause dragged out. Yes, we could just go right through our town and keep going to the alive zone if anyone was still walking over there. Things would get better the farther east we went, right? I knew Jerome didn’t want to stop there. Deep down, he knew what we would find, and it wasn’t just David guarding the prepper stash.

  “But we have to stop,” Alana said at last.

  I swallowed. “It won’t be good.” How could I make her understand? If I told her point blank what we’d find, I’d be a horrible friend. And if I didn’t prepare her, I’d also be a horrible friend. I had two bad choices.

  “Someone had to have gone to the Connors mine,” she said, staring at the car. “There’s a chance, Laney.”

  “It would depend on whether they knew right away what the disaster was,” I choked out as Jerome waited. “Then they would have had to go there immediately. How long would it have been after the light that the radiation came down?”

  Not long, I knew.

  Maybe just a few minutes.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Jerome said at last. He shifted from leg to leg, and I sensed his nerves. None of us wanted to see our hometown’s state. “We should get going, and worry about how we’re going to roll into town without alerting David.”

  * * * * *

  Despite the clouds of dread gathering in my insides, it was good to sit in a moving car, even if it wasn’t capable of too much speed. Jerome drove, and he took a few minutes of driving around the parking lot before he got used to the way the gears worked and the car handled. The seats were leather, and though the ride was bumpy, my muscles thanked me. Alana massaged her legs through the plastic suit legs as we drove, too.

  And as we crept farther north and closer to Colton, the sky darkened.

  “How long did we sleep?” Jer
ome asked, looking out the front window and leaning down. “I thought it was still morning.”

  Yikes. “Well, the three of us needed it,” I said.

  The desert moved past us, dark and desolate. At one point, we drove past a still-burning wildfire, which was thankfully a few hundred feet off the road and busy consuming brush. But the fires, at least, were getting fewer and farther between.

  It was the black spots on the landscape that worried me. They were everywhere. Some fires had burned only small areas of brush before running out of fuel, but others had raged through bigger patches of dry vegetation.

  “I guess so,” Alana said. “What should we check first when we get into town?”

  She was avoiding the worst, and I didn’t blame her. Alana would need me once we got back into town, if there was anything left of it. And I hoped we got there before dark because David and company would most likely come out after the sun went down. They didn’t have the protective suits that we did, unless they had found something back in Colton or in the mine.

  And at last, the dim shapes of town stood out on the horizon, which thankfully was just rusty instead of orange. Colton stood against the banks of the Red Rock River, which had provided life to the miners that settled there back in the late nineteenth century. It let people irrigate their plants. I hoped that the area had been too damp to burn, but I also hoped that everything was gone, so that we wouldn’t have to find the bodies. And from several miles away, it was too hard to tell.

  But Slumpy Mountain, which housed the entrance to the Connors mine, stood over Colton as if guarding it. And I wondered if there were any survivors there after all. We had made it thanks to being underground.

  The mine, though, was no longer in business.

  Unless old Mr. Connors was down there, he wouldn’t have made it, either.

  “Maybe we can do a quick drive through town,” I said. “I don’t know if we should stop. I mean, my guinea pig died. I know it. And everyone else—” I couldn’t finish, so I left silence at the end of that sentence.

  Next to me, Alana trembled. Jerome kept driving in silence, but I could feel his tension, too.

  “You don’t think they made it, do you?” she asked.

  Her mom. Her little brother.

  I swallowed. “I’m sorry, but they probably aren’t suffering anymore.”

  Jerome audibly swallowed. “I don’t think my parents are waiting to greet me, either. And I have other bad news.”

  “What?” I asked, as Alana took several sharp breaths.

  “We’re almost out of gas. We have to stop, and close to the mine.”

  I gulped. Colton, despite being a medium-sized town, had one gas station. And it was at the base of Slumpy Mountain, less than a quarter of a mile from the mine entrance. I had always looked at that dark rectangle in the rock as a kid, wondering what monsters lived down there.

  Now I knew.

  Welcome to Colton.

  The sign emerged from the deepening gloom. We had reached the city limits, and it was time for the monsters to wake.

  All of them.

  A few wooden houses rose from the gloom, intact but dark and lifeless. Yards of rock formations, cacti, and flowering plants stood empty. A few cars lined the roads, and two of them on side streets had doors flung open. A pair of bodies—one a mail carrier in baby blue and the other an older man with white hair—lay on the roads, where they fell.

  Jerome shouted a curse as the reality came down on him.

  And there was nothing I could say to make it better.

  Beside me, Alana slowly turned her face down to the car floor.

  “That’s it. I’m turning off the headlights,” Jerome said, clicking them off. His voice rose in rage with each word.

  “Yes. Keep them off.” I reached out and held Alana’s hand.

  It was just more of the same here. I told myself that I had expected this, that I knew there were likely no survivors here. I kept Alana’s hand in mine, pinning it to the leather seat with my plastic-covered fingers. “It might be better if we don’t check on our houses.”

  “We...we have to,” Alana said.

  And I understood. She needed closure.

  I looked at her. “Are you sure? It won’t be easy.”

  Alana slowly nodded. “I’m sure. I have to know.”

  Jerome slowly stopped, then turned us down Alana’s street, a side street that went almost to the outskirts of town.

  Nothing moved.

  We were in a dim reflection of the actual world, and it felt as if nothing would move here ever again.

  And then the world turned black, into charred remains of homes and gardens.

  Jerome hit the brakes and then turned the lights on again.

  Alana gasped as I understood.

  The end of her street, where her house once stood, had met a wildfire. We faced two rows of smoking remains and grayed cars, and I recognized the license plate number of the SUV that Alana’s mother drove to all our Mathletics competitions and meetings. PYG. The first three letters created some Latin word that looked like pig.

  Her SUV was otherwise unrecognizable.

  And I knew what it meant. Alana’s mother and younger brother hadn’t moved from this place that no longer existed.

  “That’s it,” Jerome breathed in disbelief. “That’s all there is left.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The next several minutes were a blur. But I held Alana as Jerome drove. Alana was trembling. She said nothing. She didn’t cry, but I held tears back for her sake.

  At least she hadn’t had to see any bodies.

  That was the only relief I had. Because I couldn’t find anything good to say to her. Even talking about moving on and driving to New York from here would be selfish. Disgusting. That was something I’d have to wait to bring up, even though the thought had struck me more than once since the burst hit.

  Jerome cursed again as we stopped in a small, intact neighborhood filled with square houses that hadn’t burned, and I realized we had stopped at his place. Jerome got out of the car and ran to the front door, unable to look away from what was inevitably inside.

  And I just sat there, rocking Alana.

  Nothing I could say could make this better.

  At last, Alana straightened up. Her eyes were blank and dead, as if she’d lost her purpose for living.

  And what purpose was there now? Just to survive? We looked at each other, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing.

  “I’m sorry,” I choked out.

  Alana nodded. “I...I should have known.”

  “Your brain was trying to protect you. It’s normal. Don’t feel bad. That’s how we stay sane.”

  Then she hiccupped and offered a nervous laugh as Jerome unlocked his door out in the gloom.

  I watched.

  He peeked inside his front door, remained there for a moment, and then backed out and closed it.

  I knew what he had sensed.

  And as he slumped there and let his head fall to the now-closed door, I broke inside.

  Was there any point to continuing?

  For me, there was, but if Alana and Jerome didn’t have hope anymore, then we’d never survive whatever David had planned for us when we had to go and get gas. I had my shotgun and pistol, but I was still against seven people who may or may not side with us when we had our confrontation.

  Before, I’d been nobody.

  A walking pity party.

  Now I was the strong one. I had to be. And now I needed to keep the three of us held together long enough to get out of here and survive the trek across the country.

  I shuddered. “Alana, I’m going to go out and talk to Jerome. The two of us will be right back. Don’t move unless David’s coming. After I get him back, then we’re going to get gas and keep going. There are people alive on the other side of the country, and once we’re close enough, we’ll be able to reach them.”

  “But what is it like out there?” Alana’s voice ros
e not with anger, but with terror.

  I swallowed, hoping that I wasn’t lying. “It has to be better than this. Getting out of here is what our families would want us to do. They wouldn’t want us to stay here and beat ourselves up.”

  Alana let out a breath. She had a long way to go before she’d feel even remotely normal. Hell, I didn’t after a full year of my loss. Things would never be the same.

  But they had to get better than this. We were at our lowest point now.

  “I’ll be right back.” I opened the back door of the car and found Jerome at the door, staying completely still as if he’d never move again.

  I put my hand on his back, and I could feel that he was trying to keep his torment silent.

  “Jerome,” I said. “I can drive, if you can’t.”

  He said nothing, and we stood there for what felt like minutes in the deepening gloom. At last, he croaked, “Thanks.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.” I sensed Jerome didn’t want to talk right now. He would, later, but now wasn’t the time. I had to get him and Alana away from this nightmare, and I had to keep us alive. “I will not tell you to man up or stay strong or any of that crap. Take as much time as you need, and then we’ll get out of here. Together.”

  And to my shock, Jerome whirled.

  He hugged me so tightly that I could barely breathe, and we stood there, in each other's arms, for what felt like an eternity.

  * * * * *

  I don’t know how long it took us to get back to the car, but this time, I took the driver’s seat. Jerome got into the back with Alana without a word. He’d gone nonverbal, and I didn’t blame him. Chances were, he wouldn’t remember this moment of his life too well afterwards, though the worst moment would stay with him forever.

  And rear back at the worst moments.

  “We have our confirmation,” he said at last, as I struggled to figure out the car gears. “We can get gas.”