“Poppy, you can stay if you want. I’m outta here.”
He slipped out the door and ran down an alley but was turned around after being inside the huge complex. Instead of returning to the street that would take him to the shoreline shipping container, he came around a corner into a busy parking lot. Dozens of motorcycles were lined up in long rows, with attendants wiping down seats and checking oil levels.
One of the helpers, a woman, waved Dwight over to her.
“You’re the first one! We heard Mr. Phillips out here. So exciting.” The young woman used a red rag to sweep a bike seat, then motioned for him to hop on. “This one is ready to go. I’ve got the flamethrower tuned like a champ. Just be sure to return to the mothership when you need to reload.”
Poppy flew right above his head, screaming at him.
“This isn’t aliens,” he whispered to her.
The woman heard him. “I’m sorry? What did you say? Aliens?”
He tried to think on his feet, what wasn’t something he was very good at. “I have a bet with my, hmm, friend, that the Americans think this all was done by aliens. Now we’re going to take this—” He patted the apparatus lashed behind his seat. “—and they’ll see you, I mean, we’re just people.”
“Mr. Phillips says it doesn’t matter. There’s no one left who can stop us, anyway. That’s why he went on the radio. We did it, man! We’ve taken back all the stolen lands.”
He laughed a bit too loud, like he was an evil genius similar to everyone else around him. “So, when you said mothership, you meant—”
“The fuel truck.” She pointed to a semi-truck hauling a long cylinder trailer. “Each motorcycle team travels with one mothership. Your team leader has explained all this, right?” She leaned on one hip, daring him to say otherwise.
“Of course. I like to be thorough.” Talk about a lie, he thought. He’d never been thorough about anything in his life. That’s why he ended up on the street in the first place. He couldn’t hold a job. Couldn’t stay clean. Never took care of himself.
But he was familiar with motorcycles, thanks to some riding he did in high school two decades ago.
Dwight started the engine. “I’m going to take it around the block!”
The woman gave him an appraising look, then flashed a thumbs-up.
He almost dropped the beast before he got out of first gear, but he steadied himself and drove off the parking lot.
Where could he go to find help? Who would he warn that the fires were coming for what was left of the country? If the jackass on the radio was being honest, it wasn’t just San Francisco. It was the whole country. Everyone was dead.
Somewhere above, Poppy chased him as he rode through the vacant downtown.
Amarillo, TX
Brent sat with Trish inside the guard booth. After the shootout, he and his five remaining men came back to the prison, but not after some things changed in their relationship.
First, they’d raided the trailers next to Trish’s to find clothing that wasn’t prison orange, as well as food and other valuables. Second, they were loaded down with every weapon they could find, including the handguns Curtis’s people had found.
Brent had no chance of disarming them again, nor did he want to. The guys could have easily killed him and done whatever they wanted with Trish, but they’d stayed on his side of lawful civilization. He figured there was no use denying they were all equals. To reflect that, he made it clear they didn’t have to follow him back to the prison complex, as long as they let him and Trish be on their way.
The men followed him back anyway, and quietly went into their cells without incident. He and Trish went into the guard booth to have a little privacy while he tended to her bruises.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” she said for the tenth time. “Those guys were absolutely the last people in the world I expected to turn up my street. I was lucky the landline still worked so I could call you. And I was double-lucky you were able to rush to my assistance like I was a helpless woman in need.”
“It was my fault it all happened. I can’t tell you how happy I am you suffered nothing worse than a few bruises. I might have shot myself if I’d gotten you killed.”
“Curtis turned out to be a real dick,” she replied dryly.
He thought of Paul accidentally killing Curtis in the kitchen. It was such a senseless accident.
“Well, put all that out of your mind. Just sit in here for a few minutes. Here, I’ll put on the radio. The music on the last station is horrible, but at least it’s something.”
He clicked on the portable radio, expecting to hear the hip-hop station, but some guy was talking. “This might be news! Hey, fellas! Come on over and listen.”
The men ran out of their cells.
Brent’s smile rubbed off immediately. It wasn’t news. It sounded more like an evil villain announcing his plans to the world. As the five ex-prisoners arrived, they soon frowned, too. They listened attentively for a while, until the man sounded like he was wrapping things up.
“My fellow humans. America is now free for the taking. Make sure what rises from the ashes is nothing like what you burn to the ground, or it too shall be consumed by fire.”
The station cut into another song, leaving them all in a state of shock.
“What does it mean, Brent?” Trish finally asked.
He looked around the room, suddenly feeling a lot better about having five men armed to the teeth guarding the prison. This whole time, he’d been thinking they were alone in this part of Texas, and maybe an area a lot larger than that. If the guy on the radio was to be believed, all of America was an empty, burning shell, just like Amarillo.
“It means we know who wiped out everyone in America.”
His long-dormant military senses kicked in.
“Kevin, I want you to spend the night up near the front doors. I’ll show you how to lock and unlock them. One of you other guys should spend the night up on the roof. Everyone needs to have radios. If you don’t have plenty of spare shotgun shells, go to the armory and resupply. Tomorrow, I’ll take a team to the local Walmart and get all the guns and ammo we can carry.”
“You think other prisoners will come back?” she asked.
It had been his main concern while driving back to the prison, but the man on the radio alerted him to the real threat. An attack had been made on his homeland, and the leader of that effort had just bragged about it to the world.
“Maybe, but they aren’t who I’m worried about.” He pointed to the radio, then looked out at the men. “Whoever this guy is, he thinks America is his. Now, I don’t know about you all, but I didn’t spend four years risking my biscuits in the rice paddies of Vietnam just so some techno-douchebag can come in and take over. He might never make it to Amarillo, US of A, but if he does, we’re going to give him a bloody Texas welcome.”
He stood up. “People, welcome to the rebel cause.”
CHAPTER 29
Queens, NY
Ted and Emily’s day ended almost the same way it began: they tore into the food supply while inside a stranger’s home. They’d also taken quick showers; a slice of normal for both of them. They’d reconvened in the tiny family room.
“Of all the places you could have chosen, you picked the one that smells like mothballs and Bengay. I think the owner was both a neat freak and extremely old.” Emily patted next to her on the floral-pattern couch. It sat facing a wall with a flat-panel television. The set was on, but it only showed multicolored bars indicating a lost signal.
“Hey, don’t knock the old-man crème. I need some myself. My legs are Jell-O right now.” He’d made the decision to keep going on foot, at least until they were a few miles outside the main part of the city. They’d had to duck into cover numerous times as they crossed through Queens and headed east toward the less developed part of Long Island. Planes streaked back and forth across the sky, including those damned Predator search drones. He couldn’t take a chance they’d be sp
otted in a car in the confusing maze of streets.
Once it got dark, the skies seemed to settle down. Now, in the fourth-floor apartment, he thought they’d avoided the worst of it and could get some rest.
He stayed on his feet a little longer, keeping watch out the rear sliding door. Outside, a large swath of blackness was between them and the city across the East River. Fires burned over there, but it was most intense in the area where he estimated Rebecca had lived.
“This is our last chance, you know.”
“For what?” she asked.
“To go north on the roads. We could cross the Throgs Neck Bridge and slip over into Connecticut. From there, we could go up the coast like we’d discussed.” He was exhausted, and his voice was hoarse from shouting much of the day. However, Emily was his boss, and he needed to give her options for their escape.
“No. We can’t. If you saw your niece, we need to get you to her.”
“Emily,” he said tiredly, “I can’t base our whole mission on my desire to find her. The safe play is to get as far from the big cities as we can, then go north to Canada.”
It was almost painful to lie to her, because he desperately wanted to find out where the helicopter went, especially after seeing Rebecca’s neighborhood burn to ash. He’d made a promise to his sis he intended to keep, but, as a major in the United States Air Force, he constantly had to prioritize. It wasn’t yet time to bail on his duty.
“You aren’t basing it on that alone.” She stood up and strode over to be next to him. “Ted, I can hear it in your voice. I see how you look at the city out this window. All you can think about is your niece.”
“No, I—”
She shushed him. “As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, I order you to take me to Montauk, at the far end of Long Island. There, we will either find my husband’s family yacht, or we’ll steal another plane.”
“There’s an airfield?” he said with excitement.
“Yep. A couple, actually. One is where I’ve done some skydiving. They’re small, but they should have what we need.”
“So,” he said with understanding, “we’ll have options when we get out there.”
She bumped him on the hip. “We can fly, take a boat, or hunker down. See? My orders make perfect sense.”
“Yeah, I guess they do. Hmm, this should help your performance evaluation.” He pretended to hold a pen and paper. “Needs work on physical fitness but has firm grip of planning ahead.”
“What? No! I’m evaluating you. Not the other way around.” She mimicked his notepad routine. “Flight skills, top notch. High marks for evasion from bad guys. Physical appearance, presentable. Refuses to admit he wants to find his niece. Black mark for that.” She made an exaggerated check mark in the air, giggling the whole time.
His exhaustion conspired with the soft lights of the living room to make him see her not as his boss, or the President of the United States, but as a pretty companion. For a few seconds longer than he knew was appropriate, he locked eyes with her.
Ted’s heart pumped as fast as it did during any of the escapes they’d survived today. He wanted to tell her how right she was about Kyla. About how he worried he was going to get Emily captured by making a mistake. And, if he was listening to his fast-pumping heart, he wanted to tell her that it wasn’t only the romantic light making her glow.
She didn’t break his gaze, and for a few seconds, he considered leaning in to kiss her. No matter what he ever thought of her politics, he could never deny the petite brunette was attractive. Plus, if you couldn’t find love in the aftermath of World War III, where could you find it?
But before he could make good on his feelings, the television set came to life. She looked at him for a couple of extra seconds, but then she turned to the TV. A middle-aged man in a black jumpsuit sat behind a desk in the oval office of the White House.
Emily appeared stunned. “What the flock is he doing there?”
The Bad Place
Deogee found herself pinned underneath her new human. She wasn’t anything like her last owner—she didn’t run, throw the ball, or take her to the park with all the other dogs. That was why it shocked her when she became agitated and tried to run from the strange floaty thing. It surprised her even more when she fell on top and crushed her to the smelly grass.
“Ouch!” she complained.
A strange heat brushed her fur, though only for a bark or two. It stung the worst anywhere the human wasn’t shielding her. It smelled strange, like a fire, but also like the mechanical juice left on roadways by cars. Before she could pin down the odor, the fire receded.
She squirmed out from underneath the human, hoping this meant they would play some more. However, she had to force her own voice to stay silent because of all the pain in her rump where the fire burned the worst.
When she’d finally made it out, she turned to see a fallen tree and lots of hot fire. She was on the edge of it, glad she didn’t have to run. Her legs shook terribly, and her ears hardly worked.
“Come on!” she barked. “Get up!”
The human was covered in black marks, and some of her removable fur had the fire on them. She looked a lot different than she did a moment ago, though she smelled the same.
No, there was something different. Deogee sniffed until she figured it out. It was the smell of death.
“Not again!” she whined.
Deogee paced around her lost friend for a long time, saddened at how the fire had taken her, even as she figured out the kindly woman had probably given her life so that she might go on.
The fires were smoldering down to nothing when she finally got the courage to leave.
She limped over to the clothing of her prior friend. One sunrise ago, she and Melissa were walking the neighborhood, as they always did, and the human had disappeared mid-stride. All she’d left behind were the coverings she’d always used in place of fur. And those had blown into the nearby bushes, making it hard for her to remember her human’s scent.
“Is it me?” she wondered. “Did I get my friendly humans killed?”
The world had been a noisy place, at least until Melissa went away. Now, it was silent, which spooked her.
“I don’t want to be alone…”
Deogee walked around the property of the convent, barely noticing the white machine flying by as it left. She searched for another human she remembered as coming to the bad place before the fire struck.
There were four of them, and one of the youngest females slathered herself with a flowery scent. Deogee didn’t particularly like it, but it was so powerful, she easily found it near the parking lot.
“She left the bad place,” she thought. If she could get away from where two of her humans perished, so much the better.
“So nice of the girl to leave a trail.”
She ran into the street, ignoring the pain of the burns.
Deogee made one stop at her friend Biscuit’s house. She was the pretty black lab she and her human had briefly freed a short time earlier. She stood up on her hind legs and pressed the latch on the front door, as her human had done.
When the door opened, her loneliness went away.
No one was around to complain about all the playful barking.
Queens, NY
“Greetings, fellow human beings. I was once known as Dr. Jayden Phillips—a college professor, Nobel-prize-winning physicist, multi-million-selling self-help author, industrialist, and, my personal favorite, Time magazine’s person of the year…” The man had long white hair down to his shoulders but wasn’t that old; maybe fifty. His brown eyes and round face seemed relaxed, almost Zen, as he spoke.
“You know who he is?” he asked Emily during a pause in the guy’s speech. The man looked extremely familiar, like he’d been on cable news channels many times before this, but Ted only caught the news while running through airports, so his recollection wasn’t good.
“Mr. Phillips runs Southern Cross Industries,” she replied. “The
y have their hand in everything—robotics, finance, computers, radio, space launches, and the guy’s immense self-help publishing empire. He’s been to the White House numerous times seeking tax breaks from President Tanager.”
The man’s speech continued, and he referenced himself as David and America as Goliath. He talked about taking down the nation and offering up the remains to the rest of the world. Then he gave his ultimatum to other countries to kick out the surviving citizens of the United States.
“Well, this seals it,” Ted remarked when it looked like it was over. “We have to do something.” It wasn’t enough that this asshole had wiped out everyone on the continent. He wanted to finish the job overseas.
“Wait—” Emily leaned close to the television. “I don’t think he’s in the real Oval Office.”
“Are you sure?” he said, glancing at the image.
“That’s the wrong desk. Believe it or not, it’s a big deal for a president to change where he sits. Several recent presidents sat at the Resolute desk. Tanager wanted to break with tradition, so he—”
“Built his own,” Ted finished.
“You nailed it.”
“So, is this guy in a replica Oval Office?”
“Almost certainly,” she replied. “I’ve been to a few. It’s one of those things VPs get to do. I take tours, get my picture taken with donors, and so on. I look like I’m doing something, you know?”
He acknowledged her, remembering his second-class role for so many years.
She went on. “There’s a replica in the Bush Library in Texas. There’s one in Virginia. Some private citizens have built their own. But I think this creep was broadcasting from Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado.”
“NORAD?”
“Yes. I’ve been there on one of my tours.” She chuckled as if remembering those simple times. “But it’s underground, so the curtains on the windows have to be drawn, like we just saw. And, if you really pay attention, the light never looks quite right outside the drapes. That’s because it’s fake.”
“Wow. You have an eye for detail.”
Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5 Page 43