by Kyla Stone
Zamira hadn’t fallen apart like some of the others. She seemed like a practical, no-nonsense abuela, almost like Sister Rosemarie from the compound.
Dakota’s chest tightened. A flood of memories threatened to cascade over her. She shoved them out of her head. There was no time for self-pity in the apocalypse.
“We should come up with a rationing plan,” she said instead.
Zamira gave her granddaughter a playful nudge, trying to get some life out of the girl. “No hogging, sí?”
The girl didn’t respond, though Piper smiled wanly.
Dakota forced herself to nod. She suddenly felt incredibly tired. “We have fifteen people and four hundred and forty-seven total items of packaged chips, candies, and cookies. To last seven days, we can only give out four packages per person a day.”
“That’s not enough!” cried Travis, the scrawny, redheaded assistant manager. “I’ll starve!”
Rasha gestured at the food pile with pursed lips. “How do we know this food is even safe to eat? We could be poisoning ourselves with every bite.”
Dakota surveyed the food. “It’s impossible for it to be irradiated. Radiation is only released the instant of detonation. After that, nothing becomes radioactive. The fallout is from the initial event—no new radiation is created.
“If fallout particles fall into opened food or water through broken pipes, then it might become contaminated. If you eat or drink it, radioactive particles will get inside your body. But anything sealed at the time of detonation is safe.”
Rasha and Travis just stared at her blankly.
“Here—pretend cockroaches are scurrying around everywhere, touching everything, but anything the cockroach can’t get to is safe—the bottled water is fine because the cockroach can’t get inside it.”
“That makes sense,” Shay said helpfully.
Schmidt swaggered over with a scornful scowl. “It’s my food. I’m keeping a close watch on everything.” He brandished a pen and notepad at them. “And I’ll be keeping track of what everyone owes, mark my words!”
Dakota clenched her teeth. This guy was getting on her last nerve. “I’ll be happy to pay for it. Just as soon as the banks open tomorrow.”
To keep herself as anonymous and unfindable as possible, she didn’t use a bank or credit cards, but he didn’t know that. Besides, she had a feeling the banks wouldn’t be opening for a while.
She was half-tempted to open the back hatch of her phone case and slide out the neatly folded emergency cash she always kept on hand—two hundred dollars—just to shut him up.
She tried not to think of her savings stashed in a hole in the wall she’d covered with one of Eden’s paintings. Right now, it was as good as gone.
If her abysmal apartment was damaged, it might be literally gone, simply burned into ash. And she’d already lost her bug out bag. So many supplies she’d carefully researched and purchased over the last two years, all the preparations she’d made.
Gone in an instant.
All she had left was the two hundred dollars.
Who knew when banks and ATMs and credit cards would work again? When would the power return? A few days? A few months?
What if there were more than three bombs? What would happen to the country then?
She pushed that thought out of her head and focused on the now. Once she got Eden, they would need food, shelter, and fresh supplies for their journey.
Cash was critical.
“Here.” Julio dug his wallet out of his back pocket and offered Schmidt a credit card and a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill. “However much the food costs, you can charge my card in full as soon as this is all over.”
“Julio—” Dakota started, frustration flaring through her. Her boss was too kindhearted for his own good. Schmidt was the jerkface. Schmidt was the one who needed a good slap across his fat, greedy face—
“Fine by me.” Schmidt seized Julio’s credit card, stuck it in the breast pocket of his manager’s uniform, and returned to pacing in front of the stockpile of supplies like a king protecting his castle from infidels.
Dakota jumped to her feet and strode up the steps toward the rear seats, as far away from people as she could get before she threw a punch at someone.
She hadn’t even been stuck in here a full day and she was already claustrophobic, anxious, and irritated as hell. It would be a miracle if she managed to stay sane for the next forty-eight hours, let alone a week.
She sank into one of the seats in the back corner and allowed herself to ease her head against the cushioned headrest. She shivered, her clothes still slightly damp. At least she was alone.
Still, she didn’t close her eyes. She needed to sleep, to rest and gather her strength for the arduous journey ahead—but she didn’t trust these people as far as she could throw them.
The thought of letting her guard down made her chest tighten, her gut twisting with apprehension.
She knew better than anyone that danger could come from any quarter, especially from scared and desperate people.
Her muscles were tensed and knotted, her stomach a cement brick. More than anything, she hated this sense of overwhelming helplessness.
Eden was out there—trapped, maybe hurt, certainly terrified. Had she been exposed to radiation? Was she slowly dying right now?
And there was Maddox, still a lethal presence stalking the edges of Dakota’s consciousness, a shadow she couldn’t escape from.
If he’d survived the blast, he wouldn’t let a bomb stop him from hunting down his prey and taking his prize. He was the most single-minded, determined person she’d ever met.
No, he wasn’t dead. She wasn’t lucky enough.
He was still out there, hunting. Coming for Eden, defenseless and unprotected.
Dakota longed to do something, to get the hell out of here and save her sister, but she couldn’t, not yet. She couldn’t do anything. She wouldn’t do anyone a lick of good by exposing herself to deadly levels of radiation and dying within a week.
No matter what, she had to keep her head.
Eden needed her.
21
Maddox
Maddox moaned. His mouth felt gritty and metallic, like it was full of dirt and copper. Sounds came to him slowly, tinny and distant.
He didn’t know how much time passed. His ears were ringing. White spots floated in front of his eyes. Blood dripped from somewhere.
Slowly, gingerly, he found he could move his hands, his arms, then his legs. Pain spiked through him, but he ignored it. He unsnapped his seatbelt and fumbled for the door handle.
It wouldn’t budge. The door wasn’t in the right shape anymore. Dimly, he became aware that the taxi had crumpled around him like a soda can.
The taxi driver hung limply, his head bloodied and lolling at a disturbing, unnatural angle, his body still bound in place by his seatbelt. The steering wheel had crushed his sternum. He was no longer alive.
The right-side rear door looked untouched. He stretched across the back seat, every part of his body aching, sharp stabs of agony flaring through his shoulder, and wrestled the door open. Wincing, he eased himself from the taxi.
He collapsed to the concrete and pulled himself up with a groan. He was still in the tunnel. Emergency lights flickered red, bathing the tunnel walls in an eerie glow. It was dim, but he could see clearly enough.
The cars were no longer in straight, orderly lines. Some had toppled to their sides, wheels still spinning; others were upside down, their roofs caved-in, metal skeletons smashed, crushed, and broken.
Up and down the tunnel, every car and truck and SUV was a wreck of twisted, smoking metal. Several cars had caught fire. It was like a giant had seized the vehicles and hurled them at the walls and ceiling, at each other.
But that didn’t make sense. His brain was fuzzy, his thoughts coming scattered and disjointed. He must have suffered a concussion from the crash.
He was alone in the tunnel. Several car doors hung open; those wh
o’d survived had abandoned their ruined cars and fled. Car alarms blared, echoing off the tunnel walls.
How long had he blacked out? Minutes? Hours?
It felt like a long time. It felt like a whole lifetime had passed in the blink of an eye.
He checked his phone, but it was dead. He felt for his holster—the Beretta was still there.
He turned, searching for the closest tunnel entrance, only a few hundred yards back the way he’d come.
He blinked and looked again.
At the end of the tunnel, the sun was gone.
Part of the tunnel had collapsed.
Mountains of rubble blocked the tunnel entrance: chunks of pipe and concrete, cables twisting like pythons, bits of metal and plastic, and a great slab of concrete tumbled from the ceiling jaunting at nearly a ninety-degree angle.
A triangle of yellow haze shone through.
A gap existed. A gap he could escape through.
He staggered toward the strange, dim light. Gagging on the choking dust, he ignored the pain groaning through his body and groped through the rubble, pushing and pulling twisted beams and chunks of collapsed wall and ceiling aside.
And then, finally, he was out.
Maddox exited the tunnel. A jumble of burning, wrecked cars blocked the entire causeway ahead of him.
He stood, stunned and gaping, taking in the ruins before him.
The sun was setting, but he could barely tell.
A massive, boiling cloud loomed over Miami.
Everything below the cloud was burning. Thick black smoke roiled up from hundreds of fires. Everywhere seethed dust and smoke and fire.
The skyline was wrong.
Skyscrapers that had reached for the sky before were gone.
The tops of forty-story buildings were simply sheared off. Some were gouged, as if a gigantic monster had Jorged itself on steel.
Still others were blackened steel skeletons, warped and bent, jutting into the sky like broken teeth.
It looked like the end of the world, as though the Armageddon he’d always heard about had descended with a violent, shuddering fury, to punish the whole Earth.
The sight filled him with a terrible awe.
It was both beautiful and terrifying.
22
Dakota
The hours inched by with agonizing slowness. Dakota’s eyes burned with exhaustion, but she refused to sleep. Anxiety tangled in her gut. She kept thinking of Ezra and the cabin—the only place she’d ever felt safe.
Dakota tilted the flashlight inside the plastic cupholder on the arm of the seat and fumbled in the side pocket of her black cargo pants, feeling the comforting security of the knife against her hip.
She pulled out the folded sheet of paper she’d always kept with her.
The knife. The drawing. The bug out bag. Those were the three things she’d kept on her person as much as physically possible.
She smoothed the paper—thinning now, and a bit ragged at the folds after two years of use. It was one of Eden’s drawings, excellently rendered as usual.
The cabin in the woods, Eden called it. But it wasn’t just a cabin; it was a small fortress. And it wasn’t in the woods; it was in the Everglades.
In the drawing, a simple wood-slat cabin with a flat tin roof squatted about two-thirds up the page, surrounded by hulking cypress trees, with white mangroves standing along the edges.
The lower half of the drawing featured a swamp spiked with saw grass, and a two-seater air-boat nestled among the stalks, almost hidden.
The address of Eden’s foster family was also hidden, carefully embedded vertically in the bark of one of the cypress trees along the left-hand side of the page.
Dakota had memorized the address long ago, but she still kept the drawing.
That innocuous-looking house nestled in the middle of a swamp was her home in a way nothing had been since her parents died nine years ago, when she was ten. She hadn’t said goodbye when she’d been forced to flee with Eden two years ago. She hoped they’d be welcomed back now.
This cabin was their destination. It was the only place she knew that offered safety, security, and three years’ worth of prepped food and supplies.
No matter what chaos was coming—and she had an uneasy feeling that Ezra would be proven right, again—that place was a bunker in any storm.
Her mind dragged her back to the day she and Eden had first stumbled upon it, both of them dirty, bleeding, hungry, and terrified.
Three years ago, Dakota had been sixteen; Eden, only twelve.
It was a midsummer night deep in the Everglades. Cicadas serenaded each other in the hot, still air. Mosquitoes whined in her ears. Humidity clung to her skin, sweat beading her forehead, her neck, under her arms.
But she’d barely felt any of that.
They were fleeing the River Grass Compound—fleeing what Dakota had done, what waited for Eden.
Blood stained Dakota’s trembling hands, her face. But it wasn’t hers.
Some of it was Eden’s.
Her heart galloping in her chest, her breath choking her throat, and the burn searing her back like acid, she grasped Eden’s hand and ran.
Their long skirts flapping around their legs, they ran past the small shacks, winding around the garden and storage sheds to the guard platform that should’ve been manned but wasn’t, and down through the trees to the edge of the swamp.
She knew where they kept the airboats, the keys hidden within the picture frame hanging on the wall of the boathouse. She even knew how to operate one.
Maddox and his brother Jacob had taken her out in secret a dozen times. Back before they’d become the enemy.
But she couldn’t think about that.
Wincing as the burned skin on her back stretched, she grabbed the keys and a flashlight hanging from a steel hook. Her blood-stained hands left a smear of red behind.
They would know she’d been here. Hopefully by then, they’d already be gone.
She paused at the edge of the muddy bank, staring at the miles and miles of saw grass puncturing a sea of still, dark water. Clumps of trees sprouted from the river of grass here and there.
Everything was the same, as far as the eye could see, stretching into the darkness. Fear throbbed through every cell in her body. The Glades was wild and dangerous. There were a hundred different ways to die.
It was the only place they could get lost.
And if they were lost, then they couldn’t be found.
There was one road out of the compound. Had they tried to take that, the Shepherds would’ve tracked them down within an hour.
This way, at least they had a chance.
What lay behind them was worse than what lay before them. She had to believe that.
Beside her, Eden let out a faint moan.
Forcing herself to move, she clenched her jaw as the welt just above her shoulder blade pulsed with heat, searing fresh and raw with her every movement.
One, two, three. Breathe.
Endure the pain. That was all she could do. If they didn’t get out of there, another burn would be the least of her problems.
Dakota sat gingerly on the seat mounted in front of the cage that housed the propeller. The boat was aluminum, about twelve feet long, and narrow.
The engine was mounted on metal scaffolding a few feet in front of the stern. A seat was bolted to a square platform lifted several feet in the air, with the passenger seat anchored below it.
Dakota pulled a small waterproof bag from beneath the passenger seat, dug around inside it, and handed her sister earplugs. She twisted hers in, too.
She put the key in the ignition, pumped the rubber-button choke three times, and turned the key. The engine belched smoke and roared to life, the propellers spinning, shaking the boat.
Eden grabbed the edges of her seat. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, blood still dribbling from the gash in her throat, despite the torn shirt Dakota had wrapped around her neck.
“Hol
d on tight,” she shouted, though her sister didn’t seem to hear her over the engine.
If Eden lost her grip and fell in the water…she could swim, but could she swim injured? Would her blood attract the bull gators, like sharks in a feeding frenzy?
Dakota gritted her teeth and fought off the panic. There was enough to worry about already. She had to have faith that her sister could do this, that they could do this.
She eased the throttle forward, adding gas slowly until they were skimming along the water at a good pace, using the steering stick to turn, pushing the stick right to go left, left to go right.
She glanced at the small GPS screen that told her where she needed to go—twenty-five miles to the levee.
She didn’t know where after that. A cheap hotel in Everglades City, maybe. Just away, somewhere far from here, somewhere safe.
They skimmed across the surface of the water. She could barely hear her own panicked, whirring thoughts over the engine. Her bare arms and legs stung from the flecks of saw grass flying at them—the airboat was like a lawnmower.
She wiped off dots of blood and ignored the pain.
What they needed were pants, boots, and long-sleeved shirts to protect against the sharp-edged saw grass. But they were both dressed in long skirts and short-sleeved blouses, the restrictive garb Dakota had been forced to wear since the first day she arrived at the compound.
After her parents died in a car accident, her devout, dour Aunt Ida had agreed to take her in, shipping her across the country to the commune where she lived and worked—the River Grass Compound, home of the Shepherds of Mercy.
But that was a lifetime ago.
The minutes passed achingly slow. She kept twisting around in her seat, half-expecting the lights from a pursuing airboat to pin her in their harsh glare.
But there was nothing.
The moonlight silvered everything. The tree islands floated like dark ships on a glowing sea. She motored past the hammocks and straight through the clumps of saw grass and cattails.