by Kyla Stone
“That could take months, years, or decades. But the immediate concern is acute radiation syndrome.”
“Could you break that down for us?” Julio asked. “What is happening—and what will happen—to all those people out there exposed to radiation?”
Shay grimaced, the light in her eyes dimming. “Medical personnel measure absorbed radiation in grays, like Dakota said. At one to two grays, acute radiation syndrome sets in with nausea, vomiting, and headaches.
“You’ll have intense itching, redness like a sunburn, and blisters and ulcers. While the cancer rate goes up dramatically, most people will survive.
“But as the level of exposure increases, you’ll lose your hair. You’ll start bleeding beneath the skin, with infections and hemorrhaging.”
Shay paused and took a steadying breath. “At six to eight grays, the stem cells in your bone marrow and the cells lining your GI tract are dying. Your circulatory system starts to collapse. Fever, diarrhea, and severe vomiting start almost right away.
“Seizures and coma will lead to death in fifty percent of patients within a few weeks, even with medical interventions such as bone marrow transplants.”
“And beyond nine gray?” Logan asked.
Shay glanced at Isabel and Piper and chewed on her thumbnail, hesitating. “Well, the odds aren’t very good.”
“Give it to us straight,” Logan said.
He needed to know exactly what he was up against. The odds had never been in his favor. Yet he’d still managed to beat them, time after time, even when a part of him would rather give in to defeat.
Shay met his gaze without flinching. “Everyone dies.”
Murmurs of mingled dismay and relief filled the auditorium. Julio touched his gold cross. Zamira bowed her head and clutched her granddaughter’s limp hand.
Shay glanced over at the unconscious man, her lips pursed. “It’s only been twenty-four hours since the bomb. The level of radiation he’s absorbed must be extremely high for the onset to be so severe so quickly.
“At least ten gray. Probably more. I doubt he’ll live more than a day.” Shay looked at Dakota, her eyes glassy with tears. “We’re the lucky ones.”
Logan hadn’t felt lucky in a very long time. Maybe never. Luck had never played into it.
Life was a scrape for survival, doing what you have to do to get by, to endure until the next miserable, monotonous day.
But now, maybe for the first time, he felt the weight of something like luck settling on him.
He was still alive.
Someone who didn’t deserve it. If he deserved anything, it was a bottomless pit, or maybe a hell of endless torture.
And yet here he was.
Lucky.
For today, at least.
27
Maddox
Twenty yards ahead of Maddox, the door to a charred Jeep thrust open.
A dark shape fell out and climbed slowly to its feet. Its body was blackened from head to foot. Its hair was burned off. Black rags hung from its torso. And the face—white bulging eyes, mouth gaping open like a black pit—it was barely human.
The creature tottered toward him, arms outstretched, palms down like some sort of zombie. Maddox watched in stunned silence as the figure lunged at him.
Maddox stepped backward, toward the entrance to the tunnel. He didn’t scream, though his heart jerked against his bruised ribcage.
The figure took one more staggering step and collapsed. Its body convulsed for a moment, then stilled.
It didn’t move.
Maddox stared down at it, blinking rapidly.
He lifted his head slowly and looked around. He was alone on the causeway. If there had been others, they’d escaped or they were dead, like the pathetic creature lying at his feet.
His head hurt like someone had driven spikes through the center of his brain. Everything was thick and fuzzy. White spots flickered in front of his vision. His mind was jumbled with confusion, shock, and pain.
It took him a long moment to even recall his name. He’d blacked out and awoken to the crushed taxi, the collapsed tunnel. He remembered that.
He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. Hours, it must’ve been. The sun had vanished from the sky.
The causeway shuddered beneath his feet. The water on either side looked dark and ominous, eager to swallow up a hundred thousand tons of concrete and steel if only given the chance.
It wasn’t safe here.
Maddox left the body behind and began to walk. He didn’t yet know what to do or where to go. Find a hospital, maybe. Escape this living hell.
There was no other way to go other than toward ground zero, at least for now. Behind him, the tunnel had collapsed in a hail of cement and twisted beams. Before him was the causeway leading to the mainland, the Atlantic Ocean far below.
He shuffled down the causeway, staggering past vehicles crushed, twisted, and smashed, their burned-out husks like metal skulls.
He moved into a world that had gone a flat and colorless gray. The air thickened with a burning, singed stench that clotted in his nostrils and clogged his throat.
The closer he got to downtown, the worse things became.
Fires from ruptured gas and downed power lines sprang to life. Smoke billowed into the blackened sky. Debris, rubble, and charred, broken palm trees lay everywhere.
All around him, buildings sagged as if their foundations were made of jelly. A forty-story steel building lay tossed like a child’s toy in the bay, half-submerged, a smashed and twisted wreck of mangled girders.
Dozens of buildings had collapsed completely, spectacular feats of architecture now utterly destroyed, the rubble forming small, jagged mountains between the wrecked structures.
Bodies littered the sidewalk and streets, slumped in burning cars. The dust and ash hung so thick in the air. The living drifted about like shadowy ghosts. In some cases, he couldn’t distinguish male from female, old from young.
Blisters marred their faces, their arms, their legs, some as large as tennis balls. Their skin erupted with angry burns, as if they’d been splashed with boiling water.
And then there were those burned and blackened like they’d been roasted alive. They moved slowly, arms outstretched, shuffling through the smoke. They walked as if in a numbed stupor, too shocked to react, to feel pain, to scream. Some were still clothed; some wore rags.
He watched an elderly woman stumbling down the sidewalk toward him. Her hair was gone. She was completely naked.
Behind her, others emerged from the smoke, their exposed bodies filmed in gray ash. The heat had burned their clothes away.
How could that be? How could any of this be?
A man brushed past him, his scorched arms outstretched to prevent the burns from touching any other part of himself. A twisted chunk of metal jutted from the man’s neck. Blood pooled in the hollow of his collarbone and dripped down his charred chest.
The thought came to Maddox to warn the man that he was bleeding out, but no sound escaped his lips.
It was strange—he heard very little sound. No screaming. No crying. He couldn’t wrap his fuzzy mind around what that meant.
A man sat on the curb, rocking back and forth as he peeled off seared shreds of his flesh from his arms. Others clutched at their ears, their eardrums ruptured from the pressure of the blast, their sooty faces contorted in agony.
A woman in her fifties drifted past him like a ghost. She clutched her stomach, blackened blood coating her hands as she held in her own intestines.
A girl of twelve or thirteen ran by, her hand over her left eye, blood leaking from the empty socket.
“What do we do?” a man cried, grasping Maddox’s shirt and shaking his shoulders.
The man wore a lavender silk shirt beneath an expensive suit. The stench of burned flesh overwhelmed the strong scent of cologne. His face twisted with an animal terror.
Maddox shoved him away. He had no answers.
Even if he did,
his only concern was for himself.
He stood in the center of the street, numb and stunned, ash and debris and chaos all around him. Something light and feathery brushed his arms, his face.
He looked up into the gloom. Something like sand was falling from the sky, fine granules mingled with the ash.
He flicked it off. More fell.
He did not understand fully what it meant.
Yet he knew on some deep, primal level, that the horror was just beginning.
28
Dakota
Day two passed much like the first: in quiet desperation.
Unable to sleep or relax, Dakota counted the seconds, minutes, and hours on her watch. She ate a Mars bar, half a box of Nerds, and a few bags of chips.
At the twenty-four-hour mark, she washed her face and armpits and rinsed out her mouth. Already, her mouth felt grimy. She ran her tongue over her fuzzy teeth over and over, fantasizing about hot showers and electric toothbrushes.
Sometime around the thirty-six-hour mark, the wounded man died.
Julio and Zamira insisted on saying a prayer over the body, and then Logan and Julio carefully dragged him out of auditorium seven, into the room next door.
The other survivors huddled together, finding some remnant of hope and connection with each other, with human contact. Schmidt, sufficiently cowed, kept to himself.
So did Dakota.
Logan had become even more restless than she was. He spent the hours pacing the aisles—first the left side, along the back, down the right aisle, across the front to begin again.
Several times, he took out his flask, shook it, and then returned it to his jeans pocket with a disgusted curse.
At the forty-six-hour mark, she couldn’t bear to wait any longer. Her sister needed her desperately. She couldn’t remain here much longer, helpless, utterly useless.
Dakota slipped down the narrow hallway unnoticed, her flashlight switched off, and eased through the auditorium’s double doors.
The wide hallway lined with giant posters of upcoming movies was swathed in heavy shadows. She could barely make out enough detail to edge down the hallway to the large foyer area.
She passed the ticket counter and the concession stand. A dense, heavy gray light streamed through the shattered front doors. Was the sky simply cloudy, or was the radiation still falling?
It shouldn’t be, but what did she know, really? All the research was based on extrapolations from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, government tests over oceans and deserts, and nuclear reactor accidents.
There had never been a large nuclear groundburst to study.
What if they were wrong?
Slowly and carefully, as if her caution could prevent contamination, she made her way to within ten yards of the entrance.
The world outside was as eerily empty and silent as it was inside the theater. In the parking lot, dozens of cars still sat where they’d been abandoned.
Fine-grained fallout covered the ground and blanketed the cars like silt. Shards of glass lay everywhere, glinting from the debris.
Three palm trees grew from a grassy island in the middle of the parking lot. She squinted, studying the palms, the way their fronds swayed and rustled. The breeze still blew to the north, maybe northwest. It was hard to tell.
If the prevailing winds blew the same direction the last two days, everything north of them was contaminated—and dangerous.
She needed to go northwest almost two and a half miles to reach her sister.
But after that, her destination was directly perpendicular to the swath of fallout. Once she and Eden traveled a few miles west, they’d be in the clear—west along Route 41, through the city and suburbs to the outskirts of civilization.
It was nearly the same path she and Eden had fled two years ago.
Of course, if the wind had changed to an easterly direction at any point, west wouldn’t be safe either. She just had to hope her plan was sound.
She hated relying on hope and assumption, but she had no choice.
“This is the right thing,” she said aloud. “It has to be.”
She left the flashlight switched off and trudged back toward auditorium seven in darkness, exhausted but resolute. She opened the auditorium door.
A figure lunged out of the shadows.
Fear jolted through her.
Instinct took over. She seized her knife and jerked it from its sheath in one fluid, practiced movement. In half a second, she had the blade pressed against her assailant’s neck. “Move and I slit your throat.”
The figure stepped swiftly to the right. He slammed the side of his palm against her knife hand.
Before she could react with a counter move, her arm was thrust backward, pain exploding in her wrist. The knife dropped from her numb fingers.
He seized her arm and shoved it against the still opened door.
She hissed out a pained breath.
“You can try,” Logan said.
Her pulse roared in her ears. The fear was in her, and she hated it. It made her furious. “Let go of me!”
He released her.
She stepped back, her heart stuttering, fear still pumping through her. The scars on her back burned.
Memories of shadows looming over her seared her mind. She blinked them away.
The fear she’d felt back then, the pain and rage and helplessness—it was the past. This was now.
She rubbed her bruised wrist and forced herself to take several deep, steady breaths before responding. The fear and adrenaline drained out of her, leaving her heavy-limbed and irritated—but at herself.
If he were a real enemy, she’d smash his knee or groin with a solid kick or claw at his eyeballs with her fingernails. She still half-wanted to. “Unless you have a death wish, in the future, you might avoid startling someone with a knife.”
He shrugged. “You hesitated. Next time, don’t give your target that window of opportunity. Stab hard and fast.”
“You’d rather I killed you, then?”
His teeth flashed in the shadows. “Like I said, you can try.”
“You’d be surprised what I can do with a knife,” she snapped, both disgruntled and grudgingly impressed.
He sounded like Ezra. Just like she’d suspected, he knew his way around a fight. He knew exactly what he was doing.
A wry smile tugged at his lips. “I’d like to see that someday.”
She bent down, retrieved her knife, and sheathed it. She pulled out her flashlight and stepped around him without looking at him. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You’re leaving,” he said to her back.
“I have to.”
“What about the fallout?”
“It’ll be forty-eight hours in less than sixty minutes. Radiation levels will be at one percent of the original dose. That’s good enough for me.”
She strode quickly down the hallway, leaving Logan Garcia behind.
29
Dakota
Dakota reached the front of the auditorium, where most of the survivors sat or slept near the screen wall.
Walter was curled in a corner, sleeping. Julio sat beside him, his head leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed. Schmidt guarded the food while Travis, Miles, and the teens stretched out on the raised-armrest seats.
Zamira, Rasha, Shay, and Piper were quietly playing a game of Monopoly Deal with cards Zamira had found in her voluminous purse. Rasha was sitting next to Piper. She’d taken an interest in the girl and helped Zamira care for her.
Piper was smiling. She was a tough, resilient little girl. She was going to make it.
Isabel, on the other hand, slumped cross-legged beside her grandmother, her hands limp on her lap, her eyes glassy and unfocused.
She needed to wake up and get a grip if she was going to survive in this dark new world. At least she had a good chance with a strong woman like Zamira looking after her.
Dakota had to worry about Eden now.
“I’m leaving,” Dako
ta announced. “I’m headed north to get my sister, then west to escape the radiation contamination. I’m taking the risk. You should stay here for another five days to be safe. There will be more food without me.”
“I’m going with you.” Shay dropped her cards and pulled herself to her feet. She ran her hands through her thick, springy coils and straightened her shoulders. “Count me in.”
Dakota shook her head. “It’s still dangerous out there. If radiation levels were at a thousand rem two days ago, it’s ten rem an hour now.”
“That doesn’t sound like much,” Rasha said.
“Remember, it’s cumulative. At ten rem an hour, you only have to spend ten to twenty hours in a contaminated area to reach acute radiation syndrome levels. And we weren’t completely protected here. We’ve already absorbed a low dose. I can’t say for sure how much.”
Rasha made a fearful sound in the back of her throat. She looked up at the ceiling as if the radiation infiltrating the theater was visible to the naked eye.
Zamira patted her shoulder. “The safest place is to wait it out here for the full week, like Dakota said.”
“What if we went south?” Miles asked. “What about the Keys? You said the radiation is only north.”
“I said probably,” Dakota corrected.
“The Keys will have their own troubles soon enough,” Logan said as he came up next to her. He stretched lazily and scratched his scruffy jaw.
Dakota took a step away from him, tensing. She could still feel his shadow looming over her, his strong hand encircling her wrist.
She was irritated with herself and him—but it also gave her an inkling of an idea.
“What do you mean?” Miles asked.
“When the trucks don’t come to stock up the stores and gas stations,” Logan said, “what’re they gonna do? They’re surrounded on three sides by water, nowhere to go but north—and that’s where the chaos is. Seems like they’re in for a world of hurt in a few days, if it hasn’t started already.”