She pulled back the manila envelope and revealed her handiwork. There was no doubt she’d made it messier by scratching over the words.
“Thanks.” She sniffled. “This is exactly what I needed.”
Faith happily keyed at the graffiti but considered her next moves.
I have to solve this.
Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, Australia
Destiny held the club over the stumbling Tasmanian tiger. She’d caught it in the eye with a pointy knob on her weapon and put a major hurt on the animal.
“Stop this,” she demanded. “I don’t want to kill you.”
She coughed from the smoke.
“Let’s both call it a day and get the hell out of here, yeah?”
The tiger shook its head as if to clear the stars out of its good eye. Then it took another run at her.
Fuck.
The tiger didn’t move nearly as fast as it had before, and her adrenaline-fortified awareness ached to end the fight. For a long moment, she felt cocky enough to strike it in the side as a way of safely encouraging it to move along, but her sister’s voice reminded her not to be heroic for no damned good reason.
Destiny struck the tiger near the injured eye socket with all the power she had left. The pointy knob bashed its skull and made a satisfying crack.
The animal rolled over like it had been turned off.
Her chest heaved as she tried to get enough good air into her lungs.
She’d shattered the tiger’s orbital bone, and blood poured out of its ruined eye socket. It should have been a victory, but the prone body made her regret her choice. “What have I done?”
You did what you had to survive, her sister would say.
I’m supposed to help animals.
The little voice provided no comeback for that. In all her years in the field, she’d never voluntarily killed anything bigger than a mosquito.
I’m supposed to help…
A short time later, she realized she’d been staring at the dead animal.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said to herself. The fire raged down in the valley and came most of the way up the escarpment. Safety was over the ridge and down the hill toward camp.
“Camp!” she shouted to herself.
Destiny pulled the radio off her belt and tried calling them again.
“Camp. I’m good. I’m on the ridge. Are you there?” They would never leave her, but each second the line remained silent, more doubt entered her mind.
She changed tack. “You’ll never guess what I’ve found. A Tasmanian tiger.” She giggled. “It’s illegal to trap them to get the bounty, but I didn’t trap this one. I had to fight him off. I should get something for that, right?”
The line came back with only static.
“Come on, guys. I’m bushed. I need help.”
Nothing like playing on the male egos to come to my rescue.
“I’m coming down,” she croaked. Her throat was as dry as Ayers Rock at noon in the summertime. Thinking about that longneck beer didn’t help with her thirst.
She’d gotten about fifty feet across the ridgeline when she stopped.
“Shit,” she declared. “Why not?”
Destiny trudged back to the body of the tiger and whipped out her phone.
“No one is going to believe this,” she said.
The flames were everywhere around her, but she took her time to get several well-focused snapshots. They were a lot better than the dark blurs she snapped of it earlier. These new pictures were now irrefutable proof of the continuing existence of this species.
It upset her to be the one responsible for killing it, so the least she could do was properly catalog it. She geo-tagged the location, threw the phone back in her pocket, and calmly walked away from the fiery ledge.
Her eyes became watery pools as soon as she descended the backside of the ridge. Her campmates were somewhere down in the valley. There was no fire within view, and she could finally breathe in fresh air. It was her moment.
She pulled out her radio again but spoke slowly because she was exhausted. “I’m coming down. Be there in fifteen. If you get the drone working, the tiger is up on top of the ridge in the open. You can’t miss it. Oh, and just so you know, I’ll kiss the first person who brings me a drink.” She didn’t care who it was.
Only silence answered her. The more she walked, the more she saw of the camping area below her. It hit her like an anvil. They had left her behind.
I-5 South of Sacramento
Buck had gone another mile while waiting for the other driver to come back on the CB. He passed marker 500 before he decided he’d waited long enough.
“Tenstepn, you got your ears on?” Buck waited a few seconds before adding, “What’s going on up there?”
Traffic still ran at a good clip on the northbound lanes, but there were fewer cars heading south, though they still drove like fiends.
“That’s where they’re coming from,” he said to Mac. A car crossed the center median on a gravel U-turn lane reserved for emergency vehicles. He jammed the gearbox as he considered whether he should do the same.
Come on, Bubba. Get on your radio.
Buck passed the turnaround, but it was firmly in his brain that he might need to get off the highway.
“Bucky, come back. I’m entering this storm. No choice. It moved too fast.” The other driver’s words were drawn out, as if what he was saying had been recorded and then played back at a slightly slower speed.
“Tenstepn, where are the other fast movers? There’s almost no one coming south.”
“Don’t know. Can only see taillights in front of me. At least my truck is getting clean.” His voice sounded mechanical and slow.
“Jesus,” he said to himself. He keyed the mic. “What marker are you at?”
“509. Last known.” That time, his voice echoed like it was inside a coffee can.
“Shit, I’m getting close,” he said to himself. A decision had to be made. It wasn’t that he normally went out of his way to avoid rainstorms, but there was something unnatural about the one ahead of him. It was larger than anything he’d ever seen before and the lightning strikes seemed to have a life of their own.
A few drops of water splashed on his windshield. Big Mac whined when he clicked on the wipers for a second to clear them.
“It’s okay, bud. It’s just a little rain.” He wondered if his own tense posture gave the dog the wrong impression.
Buck took a deep breath. “Everything is cool.”
Mac sat up and cocked his head as if to interpret his words.
“That’s right. We’re all right.” Buck laughed to ease the tension. It didn’t work.
Multiple strikes of lightning pulsed across the darkened sky right as he said it. He visualized ten growing cracks in a giant pane of glass, and each one split into more and more offshoots, like an infinite fractal of electricity.
The thunder lasted for ten seconds and rose to an intense crescendo that rocked his cab.
“Good God!” he screamed somewhere in the middle of it.
The radio hissed like hot grease in a frying pan for a few seconds, but then someone called his name.
“Bucky. This is bad. It’s—”
“We’re fine,” he replied to himself, and to Mac.
When he looked over to his pal, the dog wasn’t there. He had to look back over his shoulder to see where he’d gone. For the first time in history, Mac voluntarily went into his crate.
“Oh, shit,” he said dryly.
He knows what’s coming.
Eleven
Queens, NY
Garth and Sam made it to the top step of the subway platform before most of the other riders. His fear of being left behind had been for nothing, because the train cars were almost empty. However, he still held his friend back.
“I know you want the end car, but let’s get any one she’s not on.” The group of bus riders from the airport trudged up the steps to the
elevated station, but once on top, they were free to pick from any of the ten subway carriages. Garth pointed to the old woman who’d propositioned him.
“Aw, come on. She’s not so bad. I bet even you could get a date with her.” Sam pointed to the woman as she and her husband walked for one of the front cars.
“Nice burn,” Garth deadpanned.
The boys went for the rearmost door on the last car.
He tried to get a dig back at him. “I think I can see why Tammy didn’t want to go out with you.”
“Harsh, dude. I assure you, it had nothing to do with my great sense of humor.”
“Uh huh,” he agreed.
The door shut once they stepped inside. A woman’s voice came over the intercom: “This is a Manhattan-bound W local train. The next stop is Broadway.”
A male voice added: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”
Garth watched stragglers run to make it before the doors sealed shut. The pair of guys who looked like investment bankers were the last ones into their car. They sat at the front with a few others.
“It’s nice to have a little room,” Sam said from across the railcar. They each owned one of the wide seats facing each other.
The train smoothly accelerated out of the station. For a few moments, he watched the endless brick apartment buildings from the elevated railway, but he quickly grew bored. He pulled out his phone to see if his dad had called or texted while he was on the crowded bus. He had to think of something to say if Dad asked about the plane crash.
Sam had his phone out, too.
“Anything from your parents?” Garth carefully asked.
“Nah. I’m sure they’ll call when they can. I’m just playing this dumbassed brick breaker game.”
He didn’t have any messages, either, and the network symbol at the top of the screen had a line through it, which told him he probably wouldn’t get anything anytime soon.
Garth sat and stared at his phone for a long time as the subway stopped at a couple of stations. A part of him wanted to get in touch with his dad and let him know he was fine, but another part didn’t want to be the little kid who cried to daddy. Sam hardly seemed to care that his parents missed landing today, so why should he care about his own father who was clear across the country and not scheduled to come home for another week?
Serves him right for what he did.
He tried to muster the energy to be mad, but he’d burned through most of his anger the week before. Garth’s dad rode him hard about personal responsibility. Once his mom had passed away, things were tough for both of them. With only one income, his dad took the best-paying job he could find, which also meant he was gone for weeks at a time. By the time he got back, he probably wouldn’t remember what they had argued about. Garth wasn’t sure it was worth staying angry.
He turned inward some more until he heard a familiar station on the intercom.
“This is Queensboro Plaza. Transfers are available to the 7 train.”
Garth turned to Sam. “Say good-bye to the sky. We’re going into the tunnel.”
His friend leaned forward to get as close as possible so the few other passengers near the front wouldn’t hear him. “I say we go to Union Station and mess with the tourists. We can play the part of cranky New Yawkers.” Sam added some local twang to his speech.
He shook his head, seeing Sam in a new light now that his parents weren’t coming. “It sounds like fun any other time, but with that crash, don’t you think we should stay on this line and go to the ferry? Get back home? Maybe it would be better to load up on pizza, Mountain Dew, and binge-watch some Netflix?”
“Nah. We can do that all night. I think we should make ourselves available to the foreign ladies.”
“Aha! So that’s what this is about.” Garth felt like he’d caught him in a huge lie but quickly settled into the fact that that was how Sam thought about things most of the time. He had unusual names for girl-watching.
Sam was never caught flat-footed. “Dude. Would you rather sit alone in my house, just you and I, or would you rather polish your lady-killer skills out in the field?”
His first instinct was to say he preferred to go home, but he realized that was what Dad would prefer, too. The anger from their last argument had ebbed but wasn’t yet extinguished. He put his phone away and resolved to stop pretending to be the responsible one.
“I’d rather be out and about.”
I-5 South of Sacramento, CA
Buck slowed the Peterbilt to about twenty miles per hour. The southbound lanes were now empty of traffic, but cars, what truckers called four-wheelers, passed by on his driver’s side like they were in a hurry to get to the mammoth storm. He took little comfort that this was no different than any other change in the weather. People went too fast in the rain, sleet, and snow because many drivers operated without their brain. He would willingly join them if his scout told him all was well up ahead.
“Come in, Tenstepn. What is the situation? I’m at 504 and running out of blacktop.” He held the mic with his right hand and kept his left on the wheel. His knuckles started to turn white from gripping as if his life depended on it.
The storm was bigger than anything he’d ever seen. The churning clouds on the front face were like a horde of zombies standing behind a chain-link fence. When they broke through, they would spill out on Buck and the other drivers.
“Break 4. Anyone north of mile 504, come in.” There were other wagon-pullers on the highway ahead, but no one replied. He figured they weren’t on the citizens' band or on channel 4. He broke into channel 19 but got no reply there, either.
“Mile 505,” he said to Mac as another of the markers went by. “I don’t think this is going to end well.”
A voice echoed distantly on the CB. Buck leaned in to listen. For a few seconds, there was only static again, before he heard a man’s shouts.
“…nuclear bomb went off. Horri…”
Static swallowed the voice.
What the—
“Tenstepn? That you? Come back.” He was on 19, so he didn’t think it was.
Nothing but static came out of the little radio. The voice was gone. He jumped off 19 and poked around on some of the other channels, but they had all gone silent.
He wiped sweat from his brow as he considered those words.
Nuclear bomb.
He had never seen one except in the movies. The clouds rose high in the sky like a nuke, but they couldn’t have been formed by a detonation. There would have been a flash...
The blue light. That was a kind of flash. What if it was the leading edge of a blast coming from some other city? San Francisco was just over the Diablo Range from Sacramento. San Jose and Oakland were over there, too.
It made sense until he recalled that the blue wave came out of the east. Maybe Denver or Salt Lake City blew up?
The flat landscape made it easy to see the squall line ahead. Maybe modern bombs would take on the appearance of a giant storm over a city, especially if there was already a storm in progress. The wall of storm looked more ominous the closer it got.
Someone honked as they flew by.
“Yeah, fuck you, too!” he shouted at his windshield.
It wasn’t safe to go slow on the highway, but he didn’t think it was safe to go into that rain, either. In all his miles of driving, no storm had enough power to shut down all radio broadcasts. Even the FM band was static. He wasn’t convinced it was anything as deadly as a nuclear mushroom cloud, but he was positive that leaving the highway was the best course of action.
“There. That’s our stage right.” Buck pointed to a bridge over the highway up ahead and the paved ramp going up to it. The timing was perfect because the storm’s leading edge was a few hundred yards on the far side of it. “Exit 506.
“Tenstepn, I don’t know if you can hear me. I hope so. I’m getting off the highway at 506. You should turn around, too. Anyone hearing this on the northbound slope should shuffle back to the south. T
his storm looks like it packs a punch.”
Nothing came back on channel 19. It was as if the world had abandoned him.
Buck accelerated as he hit the offramp, but his truck’s weight and the incline kept him from getting much speed on the climb. He shared the ramp with a few vehicles also trying to abandon the highway, but he noted that one motorcycle and several cars stayed on the main highway and parked under the overpass.
When he got to the top of the ramp, he had a clear view of the storm and what remained of the road. The lanes appeared to end at the bank of clouds, mist, and rain. The whole mass moved to the south.
He was faced with a choice. He could turn right and go into the suburbs of Sacramento and maybe find somewhere to hole up. Or he could turn left and get back on the highway heading south.
Lightning snapped through the air and wrapped around a tall light pole at his intersection. The dim bulb was already on because of the surrounding darkness, but it doubled in brightness as the electromagnetic energy surged through it.
Buck watched with awe as the seconds took an eternity to roll by. The lightning clung to the light pole like it was tied to it. A second finger of energy zapped out of the cloud wall and attached to the same pole. The bulb got even brighter before it exploded, yet the lightning continued sparking near the top.
He was fully aware when the effects of the strange EM burst reached his cabin.
There was no rearview mirror to confirm what he experienced, but he put his hand on top of his head.
His wild hair now stood straight up.
Manhattan, New York
Garth looked toward the other people in the front of the well-lit train car.
“Are we under the water, Mommy?” A boy of about five looked out his window at the dark walls of the subway tunnel. Tired rectangular lights passed by at regular intervals as the train rolled on.
“I don’t know, baby.” For a reason Garth couldn’t figure out, the mother looked back to him. She sat toward the front, but he wasn’t far from her son.
“Yeah,” he said when prompted. “You are under the East River right now.”
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 9