The clerk stopped the checkout process, brushed aside some of the blonde hair blocking her eyes, and looked at him seriously. “Sorry to hear that. I’ll set you up on pump five. It will put two and a half gallons in your container. You and your pretty girlfriend will be home in no time.”
The clerk spoke up so Lydia would hear. “I love your Laura Ingalls dress!”
Girlfriend?
“Thank you!” Lydia curtseyed a little.
The blonde girl smiled at him again in a friendly way.
Garth looked sheepishly at Lydia. All of his complicated scheming was supposed to impress her, but the girl behind the counter had other plans. Not only did she not require his story, but she’d also seen him as boyfriend material, even if it was for a girl dressed like she was from the frontier.
“Thanks for helping us,” he said.
He paid for the gear with cash, then it all went in a plastic bag.
“Good luck, you two,” the clerk said in sing-song.
After holding the door for Lydia, he paused on the front walkway.
“The lovely woman seemed pleased to serve you, yet you appeared uneasy.”
Garth nodded. “I expected to have to talk our way through the gas-buying process. Instead, she didn’t ask me anything. I guess it took me by surprise.”
Lydia smirked. “Your time is not that much different than mine. She saw you were a man and treated you as such. It’s obvious that was what it was.”
She grabbed his hand before he could read anything into her words. “Show me what we do next.”
He was going to shake off her hand out of pure reflex, but he didn’t. They were doing great as a team and were having a streak of good luck. If she wanted to hold his hand in the process, he was happy to do it.
“C’mon, we have to fill up this can and then get back to the taxi. When we get there, assuming nothing goes wrong, I want to show you the next part of my master plan.”
“Is that when we can eat the chocolate?”
He chuckled and respected her single-mindedness. “We’ll eat those on the way. Maybe they’ll help us maintain this winning streak.”
“I hope!”
I-80, Wyoming
Buck and Connie didn’t listen to any books on tape after leaving Little America. The only thing that mattered was learning more about the situation in Montana. Even the problems at the SNAKE laboratory took a back seat to the threat of a nuclear war.
“This is unreal,” Connie declared. “America went over to fight in Iraq, and I guess I was afraid of chemical weapons, but I never thought I’d hear of countries using nukes. It’s madness.”
“Saddam didn’t have shit, as it turns out, but you are right. It has been decades since anyone seriously discussed using nuclear weapons. I still can’t believe what we’re hearing.”
The news was all over the place. They often repeated the role of Malmstrom Air Base in managing and possibly launching the big missiles originally designed to crush the Soviet Union, and then the talking heads debated the why of it. There didn’t seem to be a consensus. Enough time had passed that Buck expected they should have already heard about a retaliatory strike if the missiles had truly been launched.
Outside, balls of weedy green appeared randomly and in clumps over the dry, flat land. Gashes of white rock and sand appeared where the foliage didn’t grow and made long intrusions in the otherwise uniform scenery.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States is speaking from the Rose Garden. We take you there live.”
“Turn it up,” Buck requested.
Connie cranked up the radio, then removed her boots. She drew her feet up and put them on the dashboard as if hot lava were below her. In reality, it was the sleeping Golden Retriever.
“My fellow Americans and fellow humans of the world, I’m here today for one purpose. I want to reassure every nation of Earth, including anyone who may have been less than a friend previously, that we have no intention of launching our nuclear arsenal. There has been chatter in diplomatic circles explaining how changes in the Earth’s geomagnetic field, as well as the loss of many tracking satellites, has made it impossible to target anything smaller than a continent. Some believe the time to use ICBMs is coming to an end and will soon be gone. As God as my witness, I will not give the order to launch unless we are attacked first.
“The recent voluntary evacuations of New York and Philadelphia because of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant have reminded us of the dangers of radiation. The specter of all-out nuclear destruction should terrify us all. Mutually assured destruction is not what I want for the citizens of this or any country. Please follow my lead. If these weapons are soon to be obsolete, then let’s let them die.”
The President talked about the events taking place around the country and the world, but Buck and Connie already knew about those. The only thing new was an admission that troops from overseas were coming back home.
When the President was done, she turned the radio back to dull background noise.
“You think anyone will attack us?”
Buck laughed. “We have a lot of enemies, but I don’t think any of them are dumb enough to light us up.”
“Don’t politicians still excel at being dumb, or has that changed in the seventeen years I missed?”
Buck was silent for a long time since he couldn’t come up with a good counter-argument.
“That’s what I thought,” she quipped.
Thirteen
Canberra-to-Sydney Train, Australia
Destiny woke up on the train tracks. The dizzy spell was gone, and it was still the dead of night, but the spotlight of the train no longer pierced the jungle.
Becker was nearby. “I was three parts gone for a second, there,” he confessed.
“No, we weren’t drunk. I’ve felt the wobbly sensation before.” She looked for the train, thinking the light had gone off by accident, but the moonlit scene showed no evidence of the engine.
“They went back!” Becker cried out.
She got to her feet and brushed off.
“But that’s impossible,” he declared a moment later. “None of them could get into the front compartment. I locked it. I swear. It’s protocol.”
There was nervousness in his voice.
“I’m not going to report you if that’s what you’re worried about.” She helped the engineer get off the ground.
“Uh, thanks. It means a lot.”
“I blacked out this time,” she volunteered. “That’s never happened before.”
“What does it mean? Did I black out, too?”
“Not sure,” she replied.
Faith’s message about SNAKE was now overwhelming her mind. Whatever changes were going on in the world, good and bad, they stemmed from the experiments her sister was running at her place of work. If the effects were this serious in Australia, were they worse in America? Or were they better the closer one got to the source?
A train whistled in the distance. The crush of trees on both sides of the railroad grade made it difficult to tell which direction it came from.
“Is that the train arriving to pick us up?” she inquired.
“I—I don’t know. Maybe. I think it’s coming from across the gorge.”
She breathed in and steadied her exhale. “Okay, mate. Neither of us wants to end up in Canberra, so we need to get across this gorge.”
Becker had a small flashlight, which helped immensely when they went into the ditch where the bridge should have been. It did nothing to fend off the gloom of the darkened trees. They dropped about five meters into the dry creek bed, then scrambled up the far side. She was tempted to point out that the bridge hadn’t fallen in disrepair. It was gone, exactly like the Sydney Opera House.
Becker didn’t seem interested in anything but moving forward, so once they were on the far side, he started into the dense jungle.
The high-pitched train horn blew three quick times in the distance.
; “They won’t leave without us, will they?” Becker worried.
She chuckled. “You tell me. Would you leave if you’d come to pick us up but we didn’t show?”
He thought about it as they walked. “If I was ordered to depart, I guess I’d do what they wanted.”
“You wouldn’t break the rules?” she quipped. “It seems like you’re breaking them right now.”
Her snarky tone got the serious young man to laugh. “Yeah, maybe. Trainlink is pretty rigid about keeping everything moving on time. They said I might see some weird shit out here, but no one said it would be like this. When tracks end like they’d never been there, even though I just traveled on them earlier in the day, what good is protocol?”
“They knew it was bad but sent you out anyway?”
“I thought the other engineers were me mates, but I guess they used me on this route to see if I could make it out and back. Though, to be fair, a lot of them went missing, too. Still, a few of the last ones think the sun shines out their asses. They’ll probably be there when I get back.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Every organization you ever work for will have that type of people. For what it’s worth, I’m glad it was you out here and not one of them. They would have played it safe and stayed on the stranded train all night.”
“I feel a little bad about losing the engine, but if they figured out how to get it back to the Canberra shed, all’s good.”
They walked for a short time in the heavy jungle, but they had no path to follow. The train tracks stopped where the bridge should have been, but they didn’t resume on the far side. The steel rails were gone completely. Even the raised rock bed of the grade was gone. She had assumed it would be there and easy to follow. Nothing made sense, just like everything else she had seen in the past few days.
Sounds of beetles, crickets, and a thousand other insects made the forest seem to vibrate with energy around them. The flashlight often revealed little creatures scurrying to get out of their way.
The trumpet-horn of the passenger train sounded again.
“We’re going in the right direction,” she reassured him. “It has to be the pickup train, but we need to turn a little more. We’ll go that way, through those tangles.” Destiny pointed and Becker shined the light in the same direction.
“I sure don’t remember this mess on the ride in,” he said. “Maybe we went off on a siding and got lost, but the jungle shouldn’t be anywhere around here. There aren’t this many trees on the entire Canberra route.”
She knew why.
“The night makes everything look different, you know? I’m sure if we waited around until first light, we’d probably both look at this and remember where we’d seen it before. Things don’t magically appear out of nowhere.”
Oh, yes they do.
She bent the truth like a pretzel because there was no point in speculating and freaking the kid out of his mind. She hadn’t accepted the truth until she had seen the Duck of Doom up close and for real.
“Yeah, maybe,” he finally agreed.
The rescue train’s horn belted out again and sounded a lot closer than it had been a few minutes before. “Time to pick up the pace,” she encouraged, but with the brambles and dense undergrowth, they could go no faster.
As they walked, the horn continued to blare, mostly in short, repeated bursts.
Becker high-stepped into the bush, using his hands to pull him through.
“What is it?” she asked, keeping to his heels.
“They are in trouble. I think they’re leaving.”
“Bollocks,” she exclaimed.
Becker broke free of the worst of it and started to run.
I-80, Wyoming
After the President’s message, Buck and Connie settled into a long period of silence. Mac slept on the floorboard in front, probably because he was tired from his water rescue, and the radio continued to spew out the same old stuff about SNAKE, the blue light, and inexplicable phenomena across America.
Outside, the dry scrubland of western Wyoming faded into low hills on the horizon. It was a lot like the boring nothing of Nevada, except the rock was white instead of red and there was greenery scattered in small, weedy clumps. However, there wasn’t a tree in sight.
They made it an hour outside of Little America before he noticed a change on the horizon ahead.
“What’s that?” Connie asked when she noticed it. “Another storm?”
The brown dust was more reminiscent of sand storms back in Iraq, but not quite as high.
“It reminds me of a column of tanks,” he stated, “although I know it’s impossible here.”
“Hmm,” she replied. “Maybe they are tanks headed for the base in Montana?”
“Blue on blue fighting? I don’t think so. Besides, there’s no way a bunch of tanks could end up out here in the middle of nowhere in such a short time.”
They watched it grow for the next several miles until they came over a small rise in the roadway and encountered a line of brake lights.
Connie pulled her feet off the dashboard and sat up straight.
“What now?” he said with frustration. Between the admission by the president a nuclear strike wasn’t in the cards, and the weird things he’d seen since the blue light kicked off the fun, nothing would surprise him on the highway. However, it was a relief not to see a column of tanks.
“What are they?” Connie asked.
“I think they’re buffalo,” he replied with wonder. “About a million damn buffalo.”
Ahead, a line of fifty cars waited at the edge of a galloping herd of shaggy brown beasts. They crossed the highway as if it wasn’t worth an ounce of their attention. The head of the line was to the left, although it was miles in the distance. The rear of the procession was nowhere in sight. The animals came from the right, and the dust cloud created by millions of stomping feet went thousands of feet in the air, so it was impossible to see the end.
Buck picked up the microphone. “You guys won’t believe this. We have to stop to let the buffalo cross the highway.”
He guided his Peterbilt to a halt behind the last of the cars waiting at the blockage, and Monsignor rolled up next to him on the right. Buck touched his forehead in the young man’s direction, acknowledging him.
“This would be a good time to get out and stretch,” Connie remarked. “I can let Mac out, too.”
“That would be awesome,” he replied, pulling a treat out of his stash. “Give this to him after he’s done.”
She woke up Big Mac when she clicked on his leash. “Come on, boy. Let’s go for a nice, dry walk.” The dog nosed around sniffing for the treat, but Connie had it stuffed in her back pocket, so he couldn’t find it.
Buck watched them get out but didn’t follow right away. After pulling the phone from its cradle, Buck typed out a message and tried to take a picture of the herd to send to his boy.
Garth. You won’t believe what I’m doing. Watching the buffalo roam!
He hit Send, hoping to get a reply back so he could get an update on Garth’s gas situation, but the screen stayed quiet. It didn’t disappoint him too much, because disruption was the norm. If it didn’t work while sitting next to the cell tower at Little America, it was unlikely to work fifty miles away. But he would never stop trying.
Once it was in his pocket, he climbed out of the cab to stretch his legs.
Monsignor was the first to reach him. “That was a great idea getting us out of Little America ahead of everyone else, but I bet you didn’t expect to stop again so soon.”
“Nope. I don’t suppose we can drive across this river of buffalo,” Buck remarked while watching the spectacle. “Could be fun.”
The young man pursed his lips, then spat out some chewing tobacco. It reminded Buck of being back in the Corps.
Sparky evidently overheard the question as he strode up. “I think even the great Buck Rogers is going to have to wait for nature to take its course on this one. The water crossing was b
rilliant, and I’m glad we’re not stuck back there, but I think this is a deal-breaker. It looks like they could push a truck over on its side. Eve is already on the fence about going on.”
“She is?” he replied with concern.
Monsignor nodded.
“Yep,” Sparky replied. “I don’t know her that well, of course, but she seems to always be somewhere else when you talk to her. I get the feeling she’s looking for an excuse to give up. This won’t help her stay.” The other driver pointed from right to left in front of them.
The herd of trotting buffalo had to be a mile or two across and dozens of miles long. He’d seen such things in the movies, but he had never imagined how big and powerful it would seem up close. The ground shook under his boots. A person would be trampled instantly if they tried to cross, and vehicles wouldn’t fare much better.
“We’ll be fine as long as nothing shows up while we’re waiting for the end of this parade. Hey, maybe we should shoot one of them for the meat. That could feed us all for the entire trip.” Buck imagined himself walking up to the edge of the herd and using his 9-mm to bring down one of the giant animals. It would be a challenge, but he guessed he could do it.
“We have no way to store or cure the meat,” Sparky remarked. “Most of it would go to waste, you know?”
Buck laughed inwardly at all the meat he could stuff in his mini-fridge, but hundreds of pounds would indeed go to waste. However, the thought entered his mind that if he and Garth ever needed to escape together to somewhere with lots of food, the windswept plains of Wyoming would be a good choice, given the return of the great creatures.
One man and his son could live a lifetime by feeding on the herd, but he’d read enough books to know that was not how reality worked. A thousand civilian hunters would probably destroy all the buffalo in a few weeks. A Marine division could wipe them out in an afternoon.
Behind them, more big rigs and cars came over the rise and joined the line of parked vehicles. He was part of a herd too, and it was growing.
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 57