“Nothing,” she said while brushing it off. Audrey had thought she was her mom after the girl had passed out in the mine yesterday. Being mistaken for their parents was a weird phenomenon that made her feel important and helpless at the same time.
“Come on, guys,” she said louder. “We have to get going.”
Peter and Audrey sat up together. “What’s the hurry?” Peter asked.
“I want to get on the road and catch up to the police. They must be close because the cordon can’t be much bigger than the city of St. Louis. They could have never evacuated everyone.”
She hoped to find someone in the big city. Someone who knew what the heck was going on, and, she was sorry to admit, who didn’t blame the whole thing on God.
Sister Rose was a sweetheart for giving them a place to stay, and she was impressed with her wolf-dog, but Tabby wasn’t ready to stop driving.
“I can offer you whatever food I have,” Sister Rose remarked as Tabby and the teens put on shoes and gathered their weapons.
“I could eat!” Peter blabbed.
“No!” Tabby replied, feeling a little bit like a parent again. “We’ll find something when we leave, okay? We have to get going.”
Tabby pulled out the pistol she’d kept stuffed in her tight waistband. “Sister, will you take this gun? There could be bad people out there. You should be able to defend yourself. It’s really easy—”
The nun put her hands out. “No. Please, I’m not interested in guns.”
Peter tapped the tube of his shotgun. “Sister, you should listen to her. She’s pretty smart. You may not need it for people, but you might for the…” He glanced uncertainly at Deogee, her dog. “Wildlife.”
“God will care for me. Or he will not. A gun will not change my fate.”
Tabby didn’t think that was true, but she wasn’t interested in arguing. It was better for her to keep the gun, anyway.
As Tabby gathered her stuff, she tried to figure out why she was so hot to get away from the religious woman. Was it because of what she’d said about missing the boat on God’s calling? Were she and the kids left in God’s dust? Or did it have more to do with the idea a supreme being could allow the murderous disaster to happen in the first place?
Tabby believed God existed, but her parents never made her go to church, so it didn’t occur to her to pray for guidance.
“Thank you for everything, Sister. You saved our sanity last night.” She looked at the kids. The two boys poked at each other like they were play fighting. “You saved my sanity, anyway,” she said in a much quieter voice.
“You do have your hands full,” Rose replied. “If you ever come back, please stay here. Deogee and I could use the company. We may be in for a long period of silence.”
The wolf stopped and looked over when it heard its name.
“Sheesh, I hope not,” Tabby replied. “I couldn’t survive a day without chatting with someone.”
Sister Rose became calm. “You would be surprised what you can do. I was a lot like you before I came to this place, at least in regard to the pressures of life, but I found solace and peace. I once spent a year of complete silence here.”
“Didn’t that drive you insane?” Audrey squealed. “I couldn’t do that, like, for a single day.”
Tabby was more impressed. “I couldn’t do that, either. Why did you finally give it up? What changed?”
Rose seemed to chew on a response. “I gave it up when I saw the four of you.”
Peter whistled.
“Wow. I’m honored. We all are.” Tabby pointed to the teens, mostly because of the guilt she experienced for looking down on the woman. She was nothing if not filled with resolution. It was a skill Tabby needed to develop.
Rose held up her hand. “We all have our calling before God, and he does talk to us, but sometimes you have to know when he wants you to do something helpful for other people without his spelling it out. When you are out there with your shotguns and other implements of death, don’t forget that.”
Tabby saw that as her cue to leave. She took a moment to pet the dog, receiving gobs of drool for the effort. “Good pup,” she remarked.
“All right, people. The tour is leaving. Next stop, St. Louis, Missouri.”
She didn’t tell them she had no intention of stopping if things didn’t get better. The cordon was out there, possibly growing larger every second they delayed. If she had to drive all the way to Canada to find her parents, she would.
The kids ran to the car like they were going to miss it.
She and Sister Rose hugged. “Good luck to you, Sister.”
“And to you. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“I will.”
CHAPTER 4
Poor Sisters Convent, Oakville, MO
Sister Rose watched the friendly young people drive away, and she had mixed feelings about letting them go. They all carried guns for one thing, which made her uneasy. But they were all so young. She believed it might have been irresponsible to let them go off on their own like they did.
“Come on, Deogee, let’s go for a walk.”
She wasn’t ready to jump in a car and leave her home, nor did she have the ability to force them to stay with her. It would have led to conflict, which was an emotional state she’d worked for over a year to unlearn. Plus, Tabby had some hang-up about blaming everything on a gas attack. She’d tried to talk her out of that notion, but it was a lot like speaking to a stone wall.
“You lead,” she said to the dog.
It was a relief to talk again and leaving the convent without being told by Abbess Mary Francis was similarly liberating.
The gray wolf-dog paced in front of her as she left the yard and walked into the street, though the anxious female dog took a brief detour to revisit her dead master. The fallen clothes had blown into some bushes, making it difficult for the big girl to settle on one place to sniff.
“Come on, pup.”
They both moved away from the dead person. Rose was glad to let the dog search around, but also glad it chose to be with her at all. Seeing Deogee around her old master made her worry she was about to be abandoned again. It would be a lot worse now that she’d sent those kids away.
But the dog continued to pace alongside her, even as they rounded a corner and went into a subdivision of new homes.
She’d barely gotten to look at the new structures go up, despite living across the street from the development. Her cloistered lifestyle gave her little time to stare out the window and reflect, which was how the new homes sprung up almost without her knowing about them.
Deogee’s nails clicked on the hot pavement as they walked in the middle of the street. Birdsong and cricket chirps filled the air with sound; there were none of the unnatural noises of life, like cars, garage doors, or lawnmowers.
The roadway went a little uphill. The trees in front of the homes were saplings, at best, which allowed her to see all the way to the end of the street. As she expected, there were no people anywhere in sight.
“Hello?” she called out in a weak holler. “Is anyone here?”
No one answered. In fact, it seemed to get quieter.
“Hello!” she yelled in a stronger voice.
Deogee whined. Her ears were straight up, like she’d heard something up ahead.
“What is it?” she asked.
The furry ears seemed to search the air like little satellite dishes. When they locked on, she barked.
“What—” Rose began.
Another bark came from up ahead.
She hesitated, knowing another dog could lead to problems, but the gray wolf seemed intent on finding it. She’d gotten ahead of Rose and made it known she wanted her to follow. The dog looked over its shoulders, walked a few paces, then glanced back again.
Rose sighed. “All right, let’s go look.”
They didn’t have to go more than a hundred yards. A black lab was inside the front window of a house a short way up the stree
t. While they stood on the front driveway, the lab barked endlessly from the front room. It constantly fought the drapes, because they always wanted to be in front of the dog.
Rose rang the doorbell out of courtesy, though that drove the lab mad. The barking got a lot worse, making her wonder if she was doing the right thing by getting involved.
“She probably needs to be let outside,” she remarked.
“They all do,” she thought. That made her nervous. How many dogs were on this street? There were at least twenty houses. Each one could have a pet.
After jiggling the front door handle, she found it unlocked.
That made the lab go nuts inside, like she was about to invade its space, but it would be cruel to leave the dog locked up. Something had to be done.
She pushed the front door open, which released the black lab from its home. It wagged its tail furiously at her ankles, then it sniffed Deogee for a tense couple of seconds. Before Rose could reach it and give a scratch, the dog hopped off the front porch and did its business in the grass.
“We’re here to rescue you, girl” she said, wondering if being with multiple dogs was going to be a blessing or a curse.
Leesburg, VA
“This is where you said the government bunker is located,” Ted remarked as they passed the sign welcoming them to Leesburg. “Do you want to pop in and check it out?”
Emily thought about it for almost a minute.
“Emily?” he prodded.
“No, I don’t believe we should. I’ve been thinking about what you said. If there is an unseen enemy out there, and if they drove into D.C. and were surveilling the White House, they will almost certainly have eyes on the one place all the politicians would go after a disaster. We should go through town while staying far away from any Best Buys.”
“I’ll do my best, but I don’t know where the stores are located.”
“Me either,” she admitted.
“If there is someone there,” he added after some reflection, “we don’t want to give them away. If I didn’t know about it, maybe the bad guys don’t know about it, either. It would suck if we brought attention to people hiding there.”
“Good call. I’m behind you one hundred percent. Let’s keep going.”
Ted believed she’d made the right decision. It was too risky to poke around in places where they couldn’t be certain there would be friendlies. The National Guard base in Harrisburg was a hundred miles away up Hwy 15; an easy morning drive. It was an obscure location with no military significance. If they had any hope of finding a working radio without being discovered, it would be there.
An hour into their drive, they passed a sign for the Gettysburg National Battlefield. “I guess that place is going to be forgotten,” he said with regret. “Without Americans around to remember it, who will care what happened there?”
She spoke with grim firmness. “There will be Americans there again. This fight is far from over.”
He glanced at Emily, proud of her for taking that stance. “I know, ma’am. I was thinking in the short term. The place should be filled with little kids learning about the big battles and bigger wars for their freedom. The movie might be playing right now, explaining things to an empty theatre.”
He kept driving, realizing how big his part in this really was. His role in helping the vice president could one day be as talked about as General Lee forcing his men across those fields into murderous fire on the other side. It proved the point that even brilliant generals had bad days.
Ted couldn’t afford this to be his bad day.
“Think,” he willed himself.
Emily turned on the radio and went through the dial. It was the same story as yesterday: there was only one station still playing music. All the others were either gone, or they played ‘station offline’ automated messages.
“Why is this one still on?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe they’re the only one who thought to put a looped backup tape into the rotation, in case of an emergency like this.” He considered how he might have handled it. “We should listen for repeats.”
“Why?” Emily asked.
He did a double-take over in her direction. “I don’t know. I guess it would give us something to do, rather than worry about the fires, wrecks, and strange soldiers running around.”
“Oh, right.” She smiled.
They listened to the radio for many miles, sometimes suffering through the terrible songs. As they got closer to Harrisburg, he expected the station to fade away like all FM stations eventually do when you get far enough from their transmitters, but it sounded as strong as it did back in DC.
The dial setting was the same as it was back home.
“100.0 on the FM dial,” he remarked.
Amarillo, TX
Brent Whitman waved the men down the steps. “Put that stuff in Barney’s cell. We’ll use that as the storage place for all the cans of food. Toby’s cell will be for water only.”
He thought they’d put together a pretty good plan in a short period of time. Yesterday, after most of the prison residents fled to points unknown, six of the men had volunteered to stay with Brent in the lower level of the prison. Today, they focused on gathering supplies from the kitchen and infirmary. The only key he didn’t give them was for the weapons locker inside the upstairs security booth.
“We’ll keep the first aid supplies in the lower guard shack,” he suggested.
The booth already had a small cabinet designed for medical supplies, such as bandages and aspirin, so it seemed to make sense.
“What, you don’t trust us with the good stuff?” Paul, the gas thief, stood at the entrance to the cage with the water in it but pointed to the medical supplies in Brent’s arms.
“I trust you,” Brent laughed, “but tell me where you would go to fence this stuff?”
Paul was the shaggy-haired man who’d become the liaison for the remaining prisoners. He and Brent had always gotten along, and joked back and forth, but now Paul’s jokes had an edge to them. It was probably because no one had a clue about what had killed everyone on the upper levels, or in the nearby towns. “I’m just kidding with you, Mr. Whitman.”
“Please, call me Brent.” He was secretly relieved. There was no reason to suspect the men would jump him, but any rise in tension could lead to that end. It was risky to even joke with them. “We’re all equal down here.”
“Is that why you have the fire stick?” Paul said, pointing to the gun on Brent’s hip. He also liked to think of himself as a Native American. When he first came in, the man was deeply tanned, with wild hair. He looked a little wild, like a native time forgot. However, as the months of his sentence wore on, he’d become a pasty white man, like the rest of them. Even the bird tattoos on his arms lost some of their outdoorsy charm.
There wasn’t even a page in the corrections officer handbook dedicated to giving weapons to prisoners. No one ever thought it would be necessary.
Brent looked around the cell block to Paul and the five other guys. He’d known them all for months. “I’m an old man. Any one of you could jump me and take me down. You’d have already done it if that was your game. I have this gun in case we meet someone we don’t know.”
The phone rang on the security desk.
“Holy shit! That might be Austin. The state government should have its shit together by now.” Brent kept the supplies in his arms and trotted to the security booth.
The other men followed at a distance.
He chucked the medical stuff on the counter, then picked up the desk phone.
“Hello?”
“Brent? Thank God it’s you!”
“Trish?” he said with surprise.
“Yes! Is the prison open? Did the men get out?”
In a moment of clarity, he understood how the other guards intended for the prisoners to never see freedom. They’d fled the scene and had no intention of coming back. He’d done the same thing, to see the devastation for himself, bu
t he assured himself how he’d always planned to return.
Maybe someday he’d ask her about it, but he decided not to hold that against her right then. “It’s open, yes. I came back and you and the other guards were all gone. I figured everyone gave up. I… Well, I couldn’t leave these men to die.”
“Shit,” she spit out. “I mean, I’m sorry, but look. I know where some of the men went, and you’re not going to like it.”
His high blood pressure went higher. “Where are they? Where are you?”
“I can give you two answers, but you’ll only need one.”
Prisoners weren’t supposed to know where the guards lived, for their own protection, but if everyone was dead and gone, it wouldn’t be hard to find the few living people left. Maybe they saw her lights on. Maybe she was out driving around. Anyone could have broken into the police station to get addresses …
“Fuck,” he drawled. “They’re at your place.”
“Yup.”
CHAPTER 5
Harrisburg, PA
“There she is,” Ted remarked from their position a short way on the bridge over the Susquehanna River. The town of Harrisburg was a bit to the north, but the far shore was mostly trees, so it was hard to see the buildings and streets of the mid-sized city from the highway.
The airport to the south was easy to spot, however, because it had been built alongside the river. The air traffic control tower stuck up above the low hangars and long runways right at the water’s edge.
Even further down the river, the tall smokestacks of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant peeked over the treetops. The drift of mist came out from two cooling towers.
“It’s too bad they couldn’t let us drive right in,” Emily complained, leaning against the side of the Jeep.
They’d parked because the bridge was filled with a high volume of damaged cars. The flat, topless interstate bridge carried three lanes of abandoned vehicles in each direction.
“Yeah, I’m trying to decide if we should drive north and find another bridge. I’d hate to ditch my Jeep.”
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