by Thunboe, Bo
“Faster, Sean!”
They ran between the Vargas and Simpson houses, then down the tight path through the woods—bare tree branches whipping against them—and sped up when they hit the gravel maintenance road that led to the dam. Sean pulled ahead, Dan’s exhaustion deadening his legs. When Sean got to the gap where the road pierced the chain link fence that surrounded the dam he stopped and looked back. Dan waved him on. “Go! Go!”
Sean took off and Dan followed. The top of the dam was a wide expanse of rough concrete with a ten-foot-wide asphalt strip down the length of it for the Paget County Bike Trail. Both surfaces were wavy and one of the peaks caught Dan’s foot and he sprawled on the rough pavement. “Shit!” He got up and limped his way to join Sean in the middle of the dam. Mary was not there.
“This is where I saw her,” Sean said.
They stood together, gazing upriver, the entire width now covered with a layer of ice. They looked down the earthen slope of the dam and saw no sign that anyone had walked through the frost covered growth. Dan looked down at the dam’s surface and saw his own footprints in the frost. He spun around, looking for Mary’s smaller footprints.
“There!” A jumble of small footprints on the downriver side of the dam. They hustled over. Thirty feet below them, water shot out of the bottom of the dam in a tumultuous roil that spit frozen mist into the air and coated the concrete chute in thick scales of ice. The water quieted as the chute widened and returned the raging waters into the river. Below the dam the riverbanks were lined with ice and a thin skin had already bridged the river were the waters calmed a hundred feet downriver. Closer, a wide gravel bar protruded from the bank to shield the landing where people put their canoes back in the water after carrying them around the dam.
“There!” Sean pushed past Dan and took the stepped concrete decline of the back side of the dam in giant leaps. Dan looked where Sean had pointed and saw Mary. She was up against the gravel bar but under the ice crusted along it, rocking back and forth from wave action, hair billowing in the current.
Dan followed Sean, fighting his exhaustion and despair as he negotiated the awkward descent.
Sean slipped on the ice-covered spillway, recovered, then dashed along the river bank. He knelt on the rocks and pounded at the ice, breaking through and grabbing Mary by her coat. He pulled but only managed to get her head and shoulders out of the water. “Why, Mom?” Sean’s voice was shaky and high pitched. “I need you too!”
Dan crossed the ice gathered in the bottom of the spillway, then edged along the river. Sean tugged, but Mary was stuck on something below the water. Dan dropped to his knees then slid across the ice and dropped into the water, the icy chill raising goosepimples across his entire body. The current caught him, a powerful eddy that swept his legs from under him, but he fought his boots down to the bottom and waded toward Mary, the water rising past his waist, constricting his chest and making it hard to breathe. His next step found no bottom and the current swept him away from the shore. He spun once, then caught Mary’s floating leg and pulled himself to her. He found footing, put his arms under Mary and tried to lift her from the water, but she was stuck. He saw a chain wrapped around her torso.
“She’s stuck, Sean. I need you to keep a tight hold on her, but let her body come back into the water a bit to let the tension out of this chain.”
Sean let her body sink back into the water, his hands clutched tightly to her sweatshirt. Dan took a deep breath and lowered himself below the surface, eyes closed, running his hands down the length of chain until he found links caught in a crevice between two large stones. He worked the chain free, then rose with his arms under Mary and heaved her up onto the gravel, Sean falling back with his mother on top of him.
The current caught Dan, spun him around, and pulled him under. He rolled along the bottom, then scraped over a rough patch of rocks. He fought his way to the surface and gasped in a lungful of air as the current released him to the calmer waters below the portage.
“Dan!” Sean broke through the ice on the bank and splashed through the water and grabbed Dan’s collar, hauling him up onto the bank.
Dan lay there for a minute, water draining from his clothes, breathing hard. Shivering with a chill so deep his teeth clattered together.
He opened his eyes. Sean looking down on him. “I thought I’d lost you, too.”
68
The polar vortex passed through and the sun rose that next day into a clear sky. By noon the temperature was within a few degrees of freezing. Sean stood beside the new grave he and Dan had dug that morning through the frozen ground while Mrs. Fleck prepared his mom’s body for burial. Before they wrapped the quilt around her, Sean took a final moment with his mom. He’d hoped she would look peaceful or serene—one of those clichés from books he’d read—but she just looked dead. Her flesh slack and pale, limbs wooden to his touch.
He tried not to imagine Erin looking like that but the image kept fighting back into his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed his mind clear and, finally, the image left him.
“You okay?” Ed asked.
Sean didn’t answer. A few days ago he had a mom and a sister. Now he was nearly alone. His dad was long dead and Dan… would he even stick around with his wife gone? He’d never adopted Sean and Erin so had no real obligation. Sean looked across the grave. Dan had his hands clasped together in front of him, head down. He hadn’t said much while they were digging, but neither had Sean.
Dan suddenly stood up straighter, taking a deep breath, and looked around him as if he was a bear coming out of hibernation. His gaze found Sean and he pulled his mouth back into a sort of smile.
* * *
Dan stared down at the quilt-shrouded form in the bottom of the grave. Her letter—a rambling and mostly incoherent mess—explained she killed herself “to spare my men the burden of dealing with my descent into insanity when they need to focus on surviving.”
He’d promised to stick with her in sickness and health and didn’t want—or need—to be spared from his vow. Killing herself robbed him of the chance to fulfill his promise and show her how much she meant to him.
And it had left him alone.
And Sean without his mother.
How could she do that to them?
He took a deep breath, the cool air pulling him back into the present.
Sean stood across the grave, watching him. Dan smiled, or tried to.
You can show Mary what she meant to you by taking care of her son. It was time to be a real dad to this good, young man.
Do I have that in me? Dan asked himself. Am I stronger than the Fallon curse?
He stepped around the grave and stood next to Sean. He’s my son too. Together, they would make it through whatever chaos this new world throws at them.
* * *
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The story continues in CHAOS REIGNS as Dan and Sean face the many challenges the new world throws at them, and the people who come at them. Turn the page to read the first five chapters.
PREVIEW OF BOOK #2 IN THE EMP STRIKE SERIES
CHAOS REIGNS
EMP APOCALYPSE SURVIVAL THRILLER
Chapter One
Sean blew on his hands and rubbed them together to warm them. He’d read the instructions at least a dozen times and studied the diagrams for hours before attempting to put up the snare, but the book was too optimistic. The snare required a forked branch and springy sapling close together and next to a game trail. That combination didn’t exist in real life. He hadn’t found a single branch as perfectly forked as the one depicted in the diagram.
“Like it matters.” Even if he found all three exactly as described in the book, he’d screw it up. Despite Dan’s insistence that he ‘could do anything he put his mind to,’ he just wasn’t very capable. Erin had been the capable one. Had been. He shook the thought from his mind because it consu
med him if he let it in and then he became really useless. He refocused on the leg snare.
The idea was simple enough: lure a deer into tripping the trap while standing inside a wire loop. When tripped, a bent sapling would snap erect, snaring the leg and holding the deer until the hunter returned to dispatch his catch. But building the trip mechanism was not simple. The wire loop was attached to a toggle. A second wire went from the toggle to the bent sapling. The toggle was held in a forked branch by the tension of the bent sapling pulling the toggle against a baited stick. When a deer—or anything else, including Sean—jostled the baited stick, the toggle would be released and the sapling would yank the wire loop closed and hold the captured animal fast.
He eventually found a sapling near a game trail and tried to create the forked branch by tying two sticks together and ‘inserting the other end of the sticks into the ground’ as the instructions specified, but the ground was too frozen to get the sticks in deep, and the force of the bent sapling pulled them right out of the ground.
He went back to looking for a forked branch and hours later found one on a rugged little shrub that was also near a sapling and not far off the trail the deer used. Eureka! He knelt in the snow and blew on his hands to warm them, attached the wire loop to the toggle and to the sapling, and set one end of the toggle in the forked branch with the other end resting on the bait stick. He slathered the end of the bait stick with the guts of a rabbit Ed had shot with his dad’s bow. Surprisingly, deer were attracted to offal and had even been filmed eating it. When he was done, he sat back on his heels, doubting the whole plan. Even if the guts did attract a deer, what were the chances it would stand in the loop?
He added a second loop.
“You just doubled your chances, Mountain Man.”
He washed the rabbit guts from his hands in the snow, then stood back and looked at his trap. It looked almost exactly like the diagram in the book. This actually might work!
Sean squirmed under the low branches of a fir tree about twenty yards from the trap to wait. He could just see the bent sapling in the fading light and could still smell the rabbit guts. Now that he was done working, the cold seeped in, chilling his sweat dampened clothes. The book said not to get sweaty in the cold. Just another piece of bad advice. How was a guy supposed to avoid sweating when he was working hard?
He shivered, but pushed the cold out of his mind. When he brought a deer back to the court, he’d be a hero. He got credit for the first deer because he shot the arrow that killed it, but Ed told him where to stand and when to take the shot and where to aim the arrow. Ed had even scared the deer into the ‘kill zone.’ That deer was really Ed’s kill. This deer would be Sean’s kill, and it would be a huge surprise because everyone was sure the gunfire in Radar Grove had either killed all the deer or scared them away.
The wind blew and he hunkered lower, the pine needles under the tree spongy and comfortable. He balled his fingers in the palms of his glove to warm them. It wasn’t bad here under the tree, out of the wind and off the snow. He stretched out, chin on his arms, eyes on the snare.
Chapter Two
Dan Fallon tried to stay focused on what he was doing, but his mind wanted to dwell on the past and what the Pulse had taken from him: his wife, his daughter, his career. His career died in that first instant and it had hurt, but he didn’t miss being a lawyer—a courtroom warrior—at all. He missed Mary and he missed Erin and he missed their life together. But thinking about the past distracted him from the present and his duty to his son. Sean would survive this post-apocalypse world and come out the other side of it a better, stronger man. No matter how long it lasted. But three weeks into it, they had not heard a single peep from the federal government and they should have. If it still existed. “It’s gone.”
“What was that, Mr. Fallon?”
Dan paused with the bolt cutter in mid-snip and looked over at Ed. Shadows flickered across his face from the candle they were using to supplement what light bled into the crawl space from the family room. He’d always thought of Ed as ‘Erin’s little friend,’ but the boy had sprouted up into a man his freshman year of high school and was extremely capable.
“No formalities anymore, Ed. Call me Dan.”
“Okay, Mr. Fa—…Dan. So, what were you saying?”
Was I saying something? “Nothing important.” Dan bent back over their work. They were building a three-layer cage—chain link, chicken wire, and aluminum screen—to protect their food from mice and any other critter that might come after a free meal. All the materials were available free of charge to anyone willing to drag them home from the abandoned Menards a few miles way. The crawl space was the perfect place for storing food because it was a natural refrigerator that never dropped below freezing in the winter or and never got too hot in the summer. When they were all away from the house, they would padlock it to protect the food from human scavengers.
Dan’s hands were getting sore from snipping the fencing and his back and neck ached from working in the cramped space. “Let’s take a break, Ed.” Dan duck-walked across the gravel and out into the family room, stood up straight and arched his back, stretching out the kinks.
“A cup of broth?” Judy sat by the fireplace stirring a pot of deer stew. They would eat the stew until the deer ran out. Their remaining pre-Pulse food was all canned or preserved or dry and would keep until they needed it.
“I’d love it, Judy.” It had been Mary’s idea for Judy and her son to move in with them after the Pulse and Dan honored the invite after his wife died. He was glad he had because they were both a big help: with the work and with distracting him from thinking about the past.
Judy filled two mugs from the pot and set them on the coffee table. Dan stretched one more time, sat down, pulled off his gloves, and held the cup in both hands. The heat felt great, soothing the ache in his knuckles. Ed plopped down next to him and took the other cup, slurping noisily.
“Manners,” Judy said. She was about ten years older than Dan, small and thin, with strong hands and sharply defined forearms.
“Manners still count?” Ed, like Sean, was much quicker to put things from the past behind them.
“You don’t want to forget them for when they do again.” Judy was hanging onto the past harder than Dan, but was beginning to doubt a quick return to normalcy.
Dan sipped the broth, the warmth much more pleasant than the taste. Deer was too gamey. “I should be used to it.” They’d been eating it for weeks.
“Used to what, Dan?”
Judy was staring at him. “Never mind.” He needed to stop mumbling to himself. Sean deserved better than to have his last surviving family member turn into a nutjob. So far, Sean was handling the Pulse better than he was. Before the Pulse, Sean was obsessed with video games and rarely left his gaming nest in front of the basement TV. Now Dan couldn’t keep him inside where it was safe. As if reading his mind Judy said: “Sean’s still out.”
Dan looked out the patio door and saw his own reflection looking back at him. Night was falling. He got up and stood at the door, peering through his own image. Wind whipped the tree branches and leaves skittered across the ice-covered Paget River at the bottom of the yard. Good weather to stay inside, which was exactly why Sean had gone hunting. “I’ll be the only one out there,” he’d said. Maybe. Hopefully. People were getting scary.
“He’s fine, Dan.” Judy said.
Dan sipped the broth, watching the wind and feeling the cold radiating off the glass door while the fire warmed his back. He finished the broth and turned around to set the empty mug on Judy’s table and found both Ed and Judy watching him. Judy’s husband, Ed’s dad, had died a few days after the Pulse. Sometimes Dan wanted to tell them he was not a replacement, but didn’t because it wasn’t fair to deny them something that didn’t cost him anything. And if they weren’t here, it would be just him and Sean and they would have to talk about Erin and Mary and why they weren’t.
Because you failed, Fallon!
But the raw need in their gaze sometimes unnerved him.
“I’m going out to look for him.”
Ed sprang up from the couch. “I’ll go with you.”
“I’ve got this, Ed.”
“But I can—” Ed’s mom grabbed his arm.
Dan put on his coat, hat, and gloves and was about to open the patio door when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Ed, holding the big flashlight.
“Just in case.”
Dan took the flashlight and slid it into one of the big pockets on the front of his coat.
“Sean was going to set a snare in that prairie that runs along the edge of the bike trail just south of Mud Lake.”
That was the far northern edge of Radar Grove. “How was he planning on getting a deer home from there?”
Ed shrugged. “He didn’t say. Maybe build a travois?”
Dan went out through the garage then around front and onto the court. He glanced south toward Carson’s house, but didn’t see the man. Carson had convinced the rest of the court to pool all their food together in a co-op he ran, by promising them a share of the grocery store inventory he said the city would dole out. He was the court’s representative with the city due to some volunteer position he had with the city’s emergency response department before the Pulse. The grocery store food never materialized because the stores were all looted before the city could mobilize.
Dan had opted out of the co-op because he didn’t trust Carson and because Mary had always kept a deep pantry. But bringing Ed and Judy in with them had effectively cut their rations in half because they brought little food with them. With a terminally ill spouse to care for, Judy had gone to the grocery store every day as an excuse to get out of the house.