“Hang on!” he yelled.
Connie braced herself against the door.
The junk in the cabin rattled and rolled around.
Eve’s silver rig hopped a few feet sideways. Mel’s red Kenworth did the same.
The massive quake lasted about ten seconds, then it fell off to about a third as bad, with a similar amount of time full of shaking, but after a few final seconds at an even slower rate, the rattles stopped.
“I’ve never been to Colorado Springs, but don’t you dare tell me that was normal for this area.” Connie smirked, obviously glad to be able to joke about it.
“Nope. That was anything but normal. It was like a volcano threatened to open up directly under us.” The image made him swing open his door and look down at the roadway. He let out a fist-sized ball of tension that had clung to his chest while Lorraine rattled away. “It doesn’t look like…”
He peered at the pavement. There were new cracks there, he was sure of it, but he had no reason to believe there was a volcano under his tires. The run through the water and the waiting to hear about Garth were taking their toll on his psyche. A more rational explanation for the cracking was the flawed design of the roadbed since planners couldn’t have anticipated this area would get such a big tremor.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” he finally finished. “I think we can keep going.”
He heard Mac whimper.
“What is it, boy? It’s over. We’re solid. Wheels are down like they should be.” He reached back to rub Mac’s head, which normally brought him off the bed and out of his shell, but not this time.
“Boy, he’s scared,” he whispered to Connie as if Big Mac might understand him.
“You want me to sit with him?” she offered.
“That’s nice of you, but for all our sakes, I want you up here keeping watch. We’re almost there.” He nodded at the road.
“Drive on,” she agreed.
Buck stretched the CB to his lips. “All good back there?”
Eve and Monsignor were quick to respond in the positive.
“Our luck holds,” he said dramatically.
He once again raised the CB mic. “On the move.”
The surrounding area had a smattering of trees, but the foothill region around them had been mostly stripped of tall vegetation. It made it easy to see up the gullies on the hills to their right, as well as the larger mountains farther to the west. As they drove over hills and into dips, they finally saw a larger number of homes.
“This has got to be Colorado Springs,” he said, looking at a subdivision of eight or ten little homes. “The start of it, anyway.”
“It doesn’t look like much,” Connie suggested.
He gave the horn a quick tug.
“Give it time. It’s actually a cool city with some great scenery. We just have to get out of this hill country.” He checked out his window as they passed the first few homes, expecting anyone alive to come running out at the sound of his horn.
They crossed another rise.
“Aw, shit,” he blurted.
A house-sized rock had fallen from a steep incline on their right and come to rest in the middle lane of the highway. A giant gash ran up the slope next to it as if the hill was bleeding dirt.
He stopped Lorraine a good fifty yards from the blockage.
“We’re not getting out, are we?” Connie asked.
“We would have been crushed if we’d been going a little faster on our trip, so maybe haste needs to be respected on this voyage. I think the trip gods are telling us to take a breather.”
“C’mon, boy, let’s go potty.” Buck motioned to his dog.
Despite his previous misgivings and mood, Mac jumped at the opportunity to run around outside. He sprang for the door but then took it easy as he made his way down the tall steps. Once on solid ground, he was off.
“Stay close!” Buck yelled.
“You aren’t worried about him running off?”
Buck laughed. “I think he’ll sense danger about ten minutes before we do. If he finds trouble, he’ll run back inside the cab. If you see him do that, I’d advise you to follow.”
“After warning you, of course.”
“If possible, yeah, it would be my preference to be saved.”
The two young women ran up to see the big rock blocking their path.
“That’s bigger than my house!” Haley said with amazement.
“I think we can get around it,” Eve added, studying the lay of the land.
“You have to be right,” Buck agreed. “Since there is nothing any of us could do to move this behemoth.” There was no chance of getting around it to the right. Whatever flat ground there might have been on that side of the road was now filled with broken rock, soil, and tree stumps that must have fallen from higher up.
On the other side, there was a gentle dip over the rumble strips, but there was more than enough room to squeeze by as long as they took it slow and didn’t reach tip-over angle.
He studied the area for new threats. The ocean was at least a mile to their left. There were no more large rocks hanging on the hillside above. His feet felt as if they were holding steady on the ground.
Mac ran circles around Monsignor and Eve as they took turns surveying the path around the rock. As each one tried to pet him, the daffy dog would spin away like a helicopter, as if the rapid turning made his escape even faster.
“That’s one crazy dog!” Haley cried.
They all laughed at the hilarious hijinks of the young pup.
Everyone except Buck.
Twelve
Above Alpha Site
As she’d expected, the soldiers at the tank said the same thing as the first roadblock. She was persona non grata and was not allowed inside the cordon being set up by the Army. Unlike the first blockade, they didn’t let her keep the golf cart.
“Thanks for nothing!” she yelled as she walked away.
The stroll down the dusty gravel road took her around a bend, but before she returned to the pavement, she snuck off the roadway to the left and ran into the pines. Instead of returning to the refugees without finding Buck’s son, she decided to conduct a second end-run around the tank roadblock. She was far from stealthy about it, and she was insultingly unprepared for hiking through the woods in her flats, but she didn’t find any soldiers guarding the way, so she pressed on for the closest emergency exit stairwell.
A bird shrieked at her from high above. Probably laughing at her misfortune, she figured.
“No water. No food. What are you doing, Faith?” She’d spoken the words, but she heard her sister Dez saying them. Her baby sister was the wild one who thrived outdoors. Faith was the nerdy one who stuck to her books. It must have been Opposite Day.
Faith didn’t dwell on her sister, however, since she had no intention of spending much time in the woods. There were emergency exits every mile or so, and she had an idea where to find the first one. All she had to do was walk.
Another bird called from high above. Maybe it was the same one. She wasn’t a bird girl, so she had no idea what it might be, but she hoped it was having fun up there.
Minutes later, she got her reward.
“And just like that, Faith scores!” Despite her enthusiasm, she stayed quiet and out of sight of the bunker-like concrete block that formed the exit of the access point. After careful observation, she decided not to approach the abandoned-looking structure.
“Where are you?” she whispered, figuring the guards had to be somewhere.
Faith decided to skip the obvious first one and go to the second or third fire exits. It seemed like Strauss had her men focused on the refugees on the beach since all their defenses pointed that way, so there was a good chance she’d find the more distant doors unsecured.
Going to the second exit required her to go deeper into the woods. To her surprise, she came upon a confusing crisscross of trails on the forest floor. The deeper she got, the more evidence of foot traffic appeared
in the dust and needles. Even without her sister’s expertise in bushcraft, she could tell a group of people had walked by recently.
Soldiers?
She held her ground as she searched and listened. If the soldiers were out there, they wouldn’t take kindly to her sneaking around. If she was reported to Strauss, she figured her fate would be to end up in a dark cell. Now that all of existence had changed, she doubted the rule of law would save her from that horrible fate.
“So don’t get caught,” she whispered.
On tiptoes, she moved from one tree to the next. She stayed near the trail but not on it since she expected someone to come walking her way at any second. However, her sense of direction informed her the trail would take her close to the next emergency exit, so she continued in that direction.
The bird calls became louder and sounded close. She even heard the flapping of wings, though the owner of those wings wasn’t visible above her.
“That’s what I need. An agro bird.”
She chuckled at the silly thought.
Dez would slap me if she found me afraid of a damned bird.
Continuing on at a faster clip, she rounded a tree stump and lost her footing. The loose needles rolled under her shoes, and she fell flat on her butt. At first it was a laughing matter, but then she saw the giant bird.
“Bloody hell.”
The bird wasn’t in the sky or in the tree. It stood out in the open about twenty feet away with its three-yard-long wings extended to each side. It looked like a sleek version of a pelican’s body, with the ugly head and face of one of those flying Pteranodon dinosaurs. The thing in front of her had a long beak with a mean-looking row of teeth hanging out each side. It couldn’t have been a dinosaur, however, since it was covered in white feathers with black streaks along its wings.
She slowly got up.
“Good dog,” she joked.
Based on those light feathers, it could have come from the seashore, which, she realized, was only a mile or two away. Its maw, however, was more that of like a scavenger bird from a roadkill buffet. Its beak was caked in blood and viscera as if it had gutted something recently.
“Never mind me. I’m heading this way,” she said in a soothing voice, careful to walk in a wide arc away from the defensive animal.
Another bird gurgled a chirping sound behind the first one. She stopped immediately, wondering what she was walking into, and she caught a clear view of the friends of the first bird. It came as no surprise several of them stood over what had to be their fresh kills, but her legs froze when she figured out what they were feasting upon.
“This has got to be a sick joke.”
There were three uniformed bodies strewn around a particularly large pine tree. Even from twenty yards, away she could tell one of the men had his hands bound. They stuck up above his head in a frozen pose as if he’d tried to fight off the attackers.
Her mind registered the birds and the downed men, but it refused to accept that the two were related. As big as they were—nearly as tall as her—the handful of ungainly-looking things couldn’t have brought down three grown men.
That only left two possibilities.
There were bigger threats out there.
Or there were a lot more birds.
Road to Colorado Springs
Buck leaned with his cab as he purposely drove it over the edge of the highway so he could get around the fallen boulder. His left tires dipped onto the incline while his right tires skirted the edge of the road and the side of the rock. It was nowhere near the tip-over angle, but it was an unnatural position for a long-hauler. A rollover would take him about thirty feet down into a rocky culvert, far enough that there would be no saving his rig.
“Hang on,” he said to Connie, who held Mac in her arms as she worked to avoid tipping toward Buck.
He crawled along in a low gear.
“Nice and easy…” he whispered.
He hugged the edge of the rock, getting much closer than he would have if he’d been worried about scratching Lorraine’s paint. His semi had a decent base of gravity due to the wide spacing of the four rear tires and the lack of cargo. If he’d been attached to his trailer, he would have immediately tipped sideways.
The second he got clear of the giant rock, he returned to the paved surface in a gentle arc. Eve and Monsignor followed his route within a few moments. The Humvee made it look easy as it came up last.
“That’s going to be a bitch to get around when we have our trailers. Can you imagine Monsignor losing his flammables down the hill? It would hit the rock at the bottom and probably take out the fallen boulder up top.”
“Could you blow up his trailer to clear the rock?” Connie asked.
“Hmm, that’s a great idea on paper,” he replied, “but I would have to know more about what he’s carrying before I’d know if it would work. It might blow up and make a fifty-foot crater. Then we’d be right where we started.”
Buck got the convoy moving again, but they hadn’t gone five minutes before he put out the call to stop. The road crest created an overlook that gave him his first clear view of Colorado Springs.
“Would you look at that?” he said as he parked and got out.
The sprawl of the main part of the city was in view for about ten miles to their south, and the western side to their right was nestled against the foothills like it always was. However, the eastern side of the flat cityscape was angled down into the giant ocean, making it seem like it sat on a shelf that had recently broken off the wall. Skyscrapers, subdivisions, and numerous treetops poked out of the water at a fifteen-degree angle, about the same slope as a boat ramp.
Connie had moved to the driver’s seat above him. Mac lurked under her legs.
The others secured their trucks before joining him.
“Is this good or bad?” Haley asked. “I mean, the city is, like, right there. We made it, yeah? It’s just a little…off.”
The young lady had hit the nail perfectly on the head.
On the west, the city ran into a valley and out of his view. Beyond the valley, Pike’s Peak stood sentinel above the broken urban center. If he could snap his fingers and get up there, he’d have a million-dollar view of what was left of the Springs.
“This is fine,” he said in a measured tone. “The city itself is still there. As long as it isn’t slipping into the sea, it should be possible to live around here. Even if we have to use the city as our supply hub rather than a place to live, I think we can make this work.”
It was far from perfect. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but anything was better than having the city erased from existence like Denver. He tried to keep that in mind as he spoke to his friends.
“I don’t know what we’re going to find, but we have to go down there and determine if anyone is still alive or if they were taken away like those who didn’t make it to safety yesterday.”
“I don’t see any cars moving on the highway.” Eve motioned ahead. “See how I-25 comes out of the water and cuts through the unflooded part of downtown?”
The downtown wasn’t as large as he remembered, but he figured it was because a good part was in the water. The skyscrapers weren’t very tall, maybe twenty stories. Those in the water seemed much shorter, though he was only looking at their tops. Farther back, a few of the big buildings had collapsed into fissures that dotted the bent section of earth.
Buck looked up at Connie. “Please tell me you’ve been able to raise Faith?”
“Do you want to try?” She held out the radio. “I’m having terrible luck with this thing.”
“Naw, I think it’s working on our end. She just hasn’t found Garth yet, like you said before. Let’s get into town, make sure it’s livable, then get back to our people.”
He couldn’t risk stressing out about Garth since he needed to concentrate on what was ahead of him. There’d been enough excitement on the drive in to remind him of all the dangers around them. Distractions would get someone hurt.
Besides, Strauss had given them a deadline of sunset, so he had plenty of time to get back to the camp.
As long as nothing else went wrong.
Location Unknown, Pacific Ocean
Destiny scrambled for her life as the boat headed out to sea. Her stomach dropped with each leap as she hopped from bus frame to plane wing to tire pile, and it wasn’t from the effects of gravity. The longer it took to get off the junk pile, the farther away the boat traveled, and the less she saw of it.
“Did you guys bring a radio?” she asked the crewmen.
“No,” Tim answered.
The two younger men were able to keep up with her, but Barlow and Zandre took their time on the dangerous and unstable wall of debris.
“We have a few radios, of course,” Bert added between deep breaths, “but the Sydney Harbor brass took most of them so they could talk to each other. An extra one went to the engine room so they could talk to the captain, but the captain left his on the bridge for use by the arseholes now heading away from us.”
“Well, that makes perfect sense,” she said with thick sarcasm. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience the passengers. This is a cruise liner, after all.” Her opinion of the Sydney Harbor Foundation, her employer and the owner of the ship, couldn’t go any lower, but hoarding the radios made her want to physically toss those bastards over the side. Assuming she could ever get back to them.
“Yeah, a cruise liner leaving us behind!” Tim shouted as he and Bert touched down on the midnight-colored sand.
She decided it was futile to run with the two desperate men as they headed for the surf. Instead, she found a shady spot next to the battered remains of a movie billboard and waited for the two older guys to clear the pile.
“Ahoy!” she shouted as Captain Barlow got close.
“Ahoy,” he replied with a heavy sadness.
“I think your boat left you.” She didn’t point out that the captain had almost done the same thing to her back in Sydney. That had been a lifetime ago.
End of Days | Book 5 | Beyond Alpha Page 10