Dishes and utensils were scattered. Cabinets had been flung open and ransacked. The pantry door was ajar, and she opened it slowly; flashbacks of Gina ran through her head. There was nothing crouched up in the corner.
But most of the food was gone.
“Juan?” she called.
Silence. Basement? She approached the doorway to the basement warily. She stopped before opening it. She felt apprehension work its way up her spine.
“Where is everyone?” Jared called.
She turned and frowned. “Maybe the basement, but…I don’t know. What if something happened?” She didn’t want to bring up the fact that his mom had been sick. What if she had turned and killed everyone?
What if she was a mutant?
Perhaps she was going in the wrong direction with her hypothesis. What if someone had robbed them and kidnapped everyone?
“Stay here,” Jared said, just as Bradley and Fletch came in carrying a limp Stewart between them.
“What’s going on?” Bradley asked, looking at her.
“Everyone is gone.” She shrugged worriedly.
“Shit,” he sighed. He laid Stewart down on the couch for Fletch to watch and followed Jared down the steps. The steps were wooden and steep, and the bottom was concrete. She watched as Jared knocked on the basement door.
His knuckles made barely a sound and she realized that door was rock solid.
After an interminable time, the sound of heavy bolts being thrown back resounded through the dark hallway. The door opened.
“Jared, I hope that’s you man,” came Juan’s accented English.
“What if it’s not?” Jared said, pulling the door open. “You’re going to hit me with a—” he squinted and nodded his head toward something Juan was holding— “an extension cord?”
“Hey man, this thing is heavy. My cousin Benito used to use one just like it to keep the bulls in line,” he said. “Plus, I have this in case the cord didn’t incapacitate you.
“A sharp stick? And remind me to never ask you what Benito does,” Jared said and waved toward Anna. “Bring Stewart down,” he called up to them.
“It’s actually your mop. I sharpened it,” Juan confided, and Jared looked up at her with a familiar look. It was his ‘I want to say something so bad, but I won’t’ face.
Jared came back up and they took Stewart downstairs. Anna followed Jared out to the garage. She watched curiously as he unlocked the large doors in the back.
“I want this stuff cleared out and put in the basement in ten minutes. Can you work on this while I go find some other things?”
“Yes sir,” she said sarcastically, looking at all the mysterious things.
“I prefer you to call me Master.”
“How about Master Blaster?” she retorted.
“I want to make a sexual joke so bad right now,” he said.
“Save it for later.”
He left and she loaded her arms with boxes. Some were almost identical to the ones Stewart had given them back at the first armory. She knew they contained MREs. She stacked them at the top of the basement steps for someone to carry down. She worked her way to the back of the storage closet and the stuff got heavier.
Large metal cans lined the walls in the back. There must have been twenty of them, at least. She tried to pick one up.
And failed miserably.
“Let us get those,” Jared said, coming back with rolls of tarp and tape.
“Why do you have all that?” she asked quickly.
“My dates used to get pretty crazy,” he said, then handed her the stuff.
“Here, cover all the windows and doors with tarp. Duct tape them around the insides, use as much as you need to cover them well.”
“And this will help with the fallout stuff?” she asked skeptically.
“It will help keep particles from coming in. If there are particles. We don’t know. I think it will work; I saw it on a movie.”
“Of course you did.”
She covered and taped, covered and taped. She didn’t realize how many doors and windows he had here until she was tasked with taping them up. She passed Bradley, Juan, and Fletcher carrying large containers of water downstairs. Hank had his arms full of the mattress from Jared’s bedroom. He had already gotten the one from the guest room. She had the sinking feeling that they would be in the basement for a while. She hoped they would be safe there.
Jared walked through with an armload of rifles, and she did a double take. An armload of rifles?
Ten minutes later and their time was up. Through the last window she saw the clouds roiling darkly overhead. They had come from the west, where there were several major cities that had presumably just been nuked.
It must have been terrifying.
◆◆◆
Jared was the last in, and he shut the door behind them with a clank. This was her first time seeing the basement and she was kind of amazed. Jared obviously had hobbies that she would never have expected.
Right inside the door was a strange little walled in walkway that they passed through. It was a cinder block wall from floor to ceiling that turned at a ninety-degree angle, then again. It must have been difficult to bring the mattresses through that.
“Wow,” she said as she passed into the open space. She walked to a wall of white buckets and touched one lightly. “What is all this?”
Everyone was down there settling in. Jared came up and slung his arm around her waist and pulled her over to a cot. She sat gratefully, exhausted.
“That’s rice.”
Her mouth dropped open and she gave him an incredulous look. “That’s rice?”
“It was when I put it in there. I suppose it could have morphed into spaghetti noodles, but—”
“You have buckets of rice and you made fun of me for my cans of beans!”
He wrinkled his forehead at her outburst. “I made fun of you because you hoard only one kind of bean. Who does that?”
“Rice, Jared,” she threw her arm out toward the rice bucket wall.
“Yeah, but that is all different kinds of rice. And some oatmeal. And some other stuff.”
He didn’t get it. She sighed and rubbed her head. A headache was making itself known.
“So, you are a food hoarder too. I should have known.”
“We have more in common that we thought,” he said with a grin.
She looked around the large space. The basement looked to be as big as the house above. There were no windows. She never would have guessed that there was even a basement here except that he joked about it that first day.
“The bathroom is over there. It’s a composting toilet. I’m sure everyone has figured out how to use it by now,” he said. “The vent is partially covered, but I’m not sure having an open airway is a good idea…”
“Too late now. We’ll just have to keep that door shut and go in there as little as possible,” Bradley said from another cot.
“Whoever knew you could put an outhouse in a basement!” Violet said from a rocking chair nearby. She looked to be knitting something.
Anna smiled, but it died when she caught a look from Jared’s mom. She looked devastated. How could she be so inconsiderate to smile at anything when Enid still didn’t know her daughter’s fate. She watched as Jared went over to her and knelt down. He whispered in her ear and her face crumpled. Anna turned away to give her some privacy in her grief.
Hank came over and sat nearby. “How was it out there?”
“Rough. There were more of those mutant things. They’re changing, Hank. They’re changing fast, I think.”
He nodded. “Seems like it isn’t real, doesn’t it? Like this is all some kind of television show.”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“I imagine that there’s going to be all sorts of things we’re going to have to face up to. I never thought I’d live to see any kind of nuclear war,” he said.
“I don’t think it is actually a war,” she said skeptically.
“Scorched earth,” Bradley breaks in from across the room. Everyone stops talking and looks at him in the eerie lantern light.
“Yup.” Hank nods.
“What’s scorched earth?” she asks.
Jared is the one who answered, and it lacked his usual twist of humor. “It’s when they destroy anything the enemy can use. In this case, it also means destroying cities…people.”
“Isn’t that against the Geneva Conventions?”
Bradley nodded at her. “The Geneva Conventions are dead. They can do whatever they want to without repercussion.”
“So where will they stop?” Juan asked him quietly. Alejandro was sleeping soundly in his lap.
“They won’t stop,” Stewart murmured from a mattress on the floor near the corner.
Anna slipped from the cot and walked over to him. She knelt carefully to avoid jostling him and placed her hand on his head. He seemed a bit cooler. The meds must be helping a little.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I had a chunk ripped out of my leg by a crazy person.”
She smiled. “We’ll need to change the bandage soon.”
“Bradley will do it,” he said, and she was a little relieved. She didn’t know if she could bear to look at the damage. She helped him drink some water then went back over to the others.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked aloud.
“We wait,” Jared said.
Overhead, thunder boomed loudly.
Chapter Three
In the Dark
Jared
He knew there was enough food and water down here for them all to last a while. They didn’t need to worry about that. He wasn’t too sure if the place was protected though. He started building this place on a whim one day after watching an old nuclear war movie. It was meant as more of a preparedness thing and a hobby. He enjoyed doing the research on building techniques and then outfitting it.
He never expected to use it for a nuclear bomb. He especially never expected Anna to be in here with him, or all the rest of these people. He sipped his water and contemplated their next move. He was a little lost. Their main goal was obviously going to be survival.
Just survive.
It was going to be easier said than done. Not only did they now have to deal with crazy ass freaks with thermal vision running around, but they may also have to deal with nuclear fallout. It was scary as hell.
He was worried about Stewart too. He wasn’t doing well. He didn’t know if what those things had was contagious. What if Stew turned crazy one night while they were sleeping? What if he died down here?
They’d be stuck with his corpse.
He hoped those things wouldn’t happen. He liked Stewart a hell of a lot. He was a good guy and had some badass skills that they were probably going to need.
“Hey,” he heard Anna say. He felt her hand on his back.
“Hay is for horses,” he said, pulling her close.
“That’s one of the lamest jokes you’ve ever made.”
“Sorry.”
He slid back on his cot and laid down. Everyone else was resting or doing quiet things out of respect for the ones who had just come back. He pulled Anna down beside him and she laid her head on his shoulder.
“I’ve gotten used to sleeping next to you,” he told her, and she squeezed his waist.
He felt another sensation make itself know and if he didn’t turn his thoughts immediately, it was going to be embarrassing.
“I don’t suppose you’re an expert on the half-life of gamma radiation?” he said jokingly.
“Actually…” He looked at her hopefully in the gloom.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “I only know what I read in books and saw in the movies.”
She paused for a moment. “What if it’s like Chernobyl out there?”
“It’s not. There’s a huge difference between that and what happened here. For one, Chernobyl is still active. Those reactors or whatever they are, are still leaking and there are forest fires. The bombs they dropped here may not have even had nuclear warheads on them. And the radiation particles break down pretty fast. I think in a few weeks we can probably start going outside, at least here. I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else.”
He felt her shift to her right side, and he moved to cradle her from behind. He draped an arm over her waist, and she grabbed his hand. He didn’t think he was going to be able to sleep with her pressing against him like she was. Surprisingly, he got drowsy pretty quickly.
She was lucky he was so exhausted, or he might have tried to drag her off to the little closet. He could think of ways to make the weeks pass much more enjoyably.
◆◆◆
“I thought this was what you wanted?!" his father shouted. “Do you know the amount of trouble I went through for this?” His pins gleamed brightly on his dress uniform, and the ribbons that Jared had wanted to play with as a small child—and perhaps even eat— taunted him with their meanings. They were symbols of achievements, of accomplishments, and they were something Jared no longer wanted and would never have.
“No! It was what you thought I wanted! You haven’t cared enough to ask me what I wanted in years!” He paced his mother’s kitchen, and he knew the entire house could hear them arguing. His sister was likely upstairs listening while doodling in her art book. His mother…his mother was probably upset about this. She didn’t like arguments.
“Then why go along with the training and the lessons? Why the hell did you let me believe it’s what you wanted to do with your life? Why did you let me waste years of my time teaching you something that you cared nothing about? I’ll tell you son, you’re turning into a real piece of work. I thought your insolence and disrespect was just teenage rebellion, but you aren’t a teenager anymore. You’re a man now and you had better start acting like one!”
His father’s face was red with fury and veins bulged in his neck, and even the strict control he usually had on his emotions had loosened enough to let him yell. It was almost startling. Though never placid, his father never had to yell to get his point across. He started to feel guilty for getting him so worked up.
No. That’s how he got into this situation in the first place. He had to carry on and get through it, no matter what his father’s opinions were.
“I’m going to college for business. I’m going to be a regular fucking guy. I’ll work set hours and never deploy. I don’t want to spend my life commanding men and ordering them to slaughter innocent people in third world countries!” He slammed his fist on the table, a show of force and violence that he had rarely ever shown.
He had followed his father’s strict physical fitness schedule for years, many years, and he was in top physical condition. He had studied leadership manuals, training manuals, and read the literature his father had deemed necessary for his development as a future officer. It wasn’t what he wanted, and he was not going to pretend anymore. It had been a mistake for him to go on this long.
His father didn’t answer. He looked stricken. His face paled and he turned his back on Jared. Jared struggled with his emotions. He was still angry, fiercely angry. “You never cared about what I wanted. All you cared for was your prestige and the spotless reputation of this family as a generational officer mill for the Army.”
He realized he went too far, but he couldn’t take back words. Words could never be taken back. Even an apology, which he certainly wasn’t giving right now, couldn’t erase them. He was breathing hard, expecting his father to turn in a fury and lash out at him further. What he did do surprised the hell out of him.
“Get out,” his father said softly. “Don’t come back.”
Jared left the opposite of the way he had come. He left quietly, regretfully even then. There was
a foreboding deep in his gut. It was pervasive. He would never see his father again.
Not alive.
◆◆◆
He woke sometime later to laughter. He opened his eyes and looked around. It was a dream, just a dream. It had been real though, so real. He could remember every little detail and his mind returned to the image of his father…living and breathing and solid. He wished once more, out of a million times, that he could go back and make a different choice. His father might still be alive, or at least he would have died happier. He was a terrible person and not much of a man. He had killed his father with his decision.
Anna was still sleeping in his arms. He was stiff, and not in the good way. His arm was completely asleep. They must have slept for a long time. He eased out from under her as best he could with his useless arm and looked at his watch. Five-thirty. His watch said it was evening. So, it was the same day.
He awkwardly pushed himself up and over Anna, who turned on her stomach and slept on. They were going to need a bigger bed. His stomach growled and his arm burned uncomfortably as he searched out Bradley and Hank. Stewart was propped up on his pillows in the corner. He had a cloth over his forehead. His fever must have come back.
Bradley, Hank, Juan, and Carlos were sitting around a table eating a random assortment of foods.
“Was Stew sick before?” he asked Bradley.
“With the Russian flu? Before this all happened, you mean?”
Jared nodded.
Bradley’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think so. We were both working AGR at the armory full time. We’ve been doing that for years. I would have known if he was sick.”
“Even on the weekend or something?” Jared asked, thinking of what happened to Anna.
“Yeah, we usually spent Saturdays or Sundays out fishing or something. I would have known.”
“I wonder if he’s got the sickness now, or if it’s an infection?” Jared said.
The Salvation Plague | Book 2 | The Mutation Page 2