by Kyla Stone
Dakota repressed a shudder. It already seemed like another lifetime, but the attack at Old Navy had happened only hours ago.
She was already concerned enough about Maddox and whatever other random psychos were roaming the city. Now the Blood Outlaws were hunting them, too.
Uneasiness swept through her. This wasn’t going to be the worst of it, not by a long shot.
“May I put my hands down, now?” Dave asked nervously.
“No,” Logan said, at the same time Shay exclaimed, “Of course!”
Dave looked confused. Dakota rolled her eyes. “Go ahead.”
Dave turned to the stairwell. “You can come down now.”
Behind him, a petite Haitian woman in her fifties with silver cropped hair and a younger Asian woman in a wrinkled business suit and smeared eye-makeup cautiously descended the stairs. “This is Lydie—” he gestured at the older black woman, “and Amy.”
Both women nodded tightly.
“Can you tell us anything?” Dakota asked. “We haven’t met anyone else, either.” Anyone else alive, she meant, but she didn’t say the words out loud.
“None of our computers or electronics work,” Lydie said, “but Amy has this portable radio she brings in to play oldies at lunchtime…it still works. The batteries are about to die, so we’re conserving it now. They play the same emergency broadcast on every station over and over, but once in a while, they add new information.”
Dakota and Logan exchanged tense glances. Finally, they were about to get real information.
“We only know what we heard on the news before the blast,” Logan said. “What the hell happened?”
Dave and Amy only shook their heads. Lydie’s mouth pressed into a grim line. “It’s so awful…Thirteen. There were thirteen.”
“Thirteen what?” Shay asked.
“Bombs,” Amy whispered. “Thirteen Improvised Nuclear Devices detonated across the United States.”
Shay made a wounded sound in the back of her throat. Logan sucked in a sharp, startled breath.
All the blood rushed to Dakota’s head. She felt dazed, shaken to her core.
Thirteen cities decimated just like Miami. It was almost unbelievable. Someone’s idea of a sick joke. Except that they’d survived one of the blasts. They knew it was all too real.
“Mother Mary and Joseph.” Julio touched his gold cross, his pallor ashen.
“There were supposed to be fourteen,” Dave said, “but the one in Chicago was discovered and defused in time.”
“Which cities?” Logan asked hoarsely.
Lydie recited them like they’d been burned into her mind. “Miami. Los Angeles. Long Beach. Charleston. Norfolk. Savannah. New Orleans. Houston. Corpus Christi. Seattle. New York City. Atlanta. And Washington D.C.”
Dakota stared at the woman, barely able to comprehend her words. There was something about the targeted cities, something that didn’t make sense. But before she could ask, Dave was talking again.
“The terrorist bastards managed to get the IND close enough to wipe out the White House, the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court. Only nine Congress members are still alive. The president and vice-president didn’t make it.”
Lydie sucked in a harsh breath. “President Pro Tempore of the Senate Dianna Harrington is now the president of the United States. I didn’t even know who she was before two days ago. And now she’s president.”
Even after all they’d suffered, the survivors’ words still struck her like a physical blow. It was worse than she’d thought. Far worse.
Hadn’t Ezra warned her of this?
Another memory niggled at the far edges of her mind. Raving, pulpit-pounding sermons of impending doom, dire predictions of fury and fire descending from the heavens to scorch the earth and every person in it—everyone but the chosen.
She shook the memory out of her head. Those were the delusions of a madman and the mindless fools brainwashed into worshiping his depraved teachings.
She’d left all that behind the night she’d fled the compound.
She never wanted to think of the Prophet or any of his damn Shepherds again.
“How many people—” Julio swallowed. Tears shimmered in his eyes. He didn’t bother to wipe them away. “How many dead?”
Lydie closed her eyes and spoke like she was reciting from a news report she’d memorized. Maybe she had. Maybe facts and figures with such terrible arithmetic were seared into your mind forever.
“The emergency broadcasts reported over 100,000 people are dead in New York City alone, with 200,000 seriously injured. Washington D.C. is reporting 300,000 injuries. And that doesn’t even include all the people suffering from radiation. They don’t know how many people are sick—or will be soon.”
“The news estimated at least a million people are already dead,” Lydie said heavily. “Millions injured. Even more sick with radiation. Every hospital in the country is just overwhelmed.”
“What about Miami itself?” Dakota asked.
“It looks like a war zone,” Amy said. Her voice was so soft, Dakota could barely hear her. Shadows rimmed her blood-shot eyes. Her expression was haunted. “Ground zero is the iconic Miami Tower. It no longer exists. The business district is gone. The Miami skyline has just been…decimated. Miami Center, the Met 2, the Southeast Financial Center building, Vizcayne, the Asia…”
Shay gnawed on her thumbnail, silently shaking her head, as if her disbelief could somehow stop the endless stream of horror.
But it couldn’t. There was no stopping any of it.
It felt like a terrible nightmare.
A chance of geography had spared them from the worst of it—the collapsing skyscrapers, horrific third-degree burns, and doses of radiation high enough to kill a grown man within days.
Dakota had never thought herself lucky before now; today, she counted herself blessed. Yet even in her relief, guilt speared her.
Why her? Why them? They weren’t any more deserving than anyone else.
It was all random, accidental and arbitrary. Who lived or died determined by nothing more than a cosmic roll of the dice.
The thought chilled her to the bone.
Shay and Julio talked with the group for another minute, but Dakota hardly heard them. More than ever, she wanted to get the hell out of there.
She caught Logan’s gaze. He nodded.
“What’re your plans?” Julio asked.
“We’re staying for another day or two.” Dave ran a shaky hand through his thinning hair. “We have food and water from the break room. Then we’ll head north on I-95 until we find help or a FEMA camp for all the evacuees and start searching for our families.”
Shay hugged Lydie and Amy. Julio shook Dave’s hand. Even Dakota felt a strange connection to these strangers. They were all survivors of the same devastating catastrophe.
“Thanks for the information,” Dakota said. “And good luck.”
Within five minutes, they’d left their fellow survivors and Palm Industrial Center behind and were back on the road, headed toward Eden.
16
Maddox
Maddox shuffled down the center of the torn and buckled road.
He’d had to turn back and find an alternate route after an avalanche of debris had tumbled down between two mid-rise condo buildings, sealing off the main avenue.
It was no matter. A few blocks down, he could turn east and then north again, weaving his way through the rubble and destruction until he found the way cleared for him.
He had faith it would be.
For several hours yesterday, he’d been overwhelmed with weakness from the crash. His ribs ached fiercely. His head and the base of his spine throbbed.
His stomach still felt like it had been turned inside out.
He hadn’t eaten in two days. He wasn’t hungry.
Maybe he was experiencing some of the effects of radiation. Back in the tunnel, he’d blacked out for hours, which had protected him from the prompt radiation at detonation
.
But maybe there was more out here.
When night fell, he’d been forced to take shelter inside a hotel lobby. It hadn’t been easy to find one free of fetid, rotting bodies, but at last he’d succeeded.
He’d sought out a comfortable leather sofa and slept for hours. A water cooler spared from the blast offered the only sustenance he needed.
He longed for that water now. Hot, humid air soaked his shirt with sweat. The blazing heat sapped his strength, but he pressed on.
Ahead of him, a man blocked his path. A man kneeling in the valley of a mountain range of rubble, oily smoke rising up all around him.
Something about the way the man knelt, as if in supplication, gave him pause.
The man looked up at Maddox.
He was naked, his skin a boiling mass of raw burns. His face was scorched so badly that Maddox could see flecks of bone within the wreckage of flesh. His eyes were filmed with milky white—he’d been blinded by the light flash.
“Save me,” he begged.
The man longed for death, for an end to his earthly suffering.
The man was a wretch, as were all who refused the call of the Prophet, who chose their own selfish path over The Way. He was a sinner being punished for his sins.
Maddox didn’t know what the man had done. He didn’t need to know. But he could help the man if he wished.
His Beretta M9 was holstered at his hip. But he didn’t have spare ammo; his bag had been left in the taxi, burned to ash or melded to the backseat.
He didn’t know what other obstacles lay in his path. He didn’t know how difficult the task before him would be—whether the girls would come easily, or if more persuasive force would be required.
He needed every bullet for himself.
Besides, this man was simply enduring the punishment he deserved. Maybe when he had suffered enough, God would grant him mercy.
But that wasn’t up to Maddox.
He didn’t care what happened to the man. He didn’t care what happened to any of these people. They’d made their choice, just like he had made his.
He sidestepped the wretch, leaving him to his penance.
Maddox continued his journey, every step bringing him closer to his goal, to completing his mission and taking his place as one of the chosen, a true Shepherd.
Fixed always in his mind was the tan stucco house with the powder-blue shutters and the pink flamingo stuck in the mulch.
17
Dakota
After they left the office building and Dave, Lydie, and Amy behind, Dakota and the others walked for another hour, forced to backtrack again to avoid more fires. The entire city seemed like it was ablaze.
They kept to side roads and back alleys, always ready to run and hide if they heard another vehicle roaming the streets. It was necessary, though it only slowed them down further.
Dakota felt every wasted second ticking inside her head like another bomb waiting to explode.
No one talked about the thirteen bombs. It was too damn depressing, too overwhelming. The state of the country out there—and the possibility that things might be worse outside of Miami, not better—was too horrifying to contemplate.
At least the groans from the trapped and dying in nearby buildings had faded away. Now, it was silent again but for the occasional buzzing of flies and their own footsteps.
Logan trudged beside her. He swiped sweat from his forehead with his arm and pulled a half-melted Snickers bar out of his bag with one hand, his other hand occupied with a Budweiser.
He’d already had three.
“So, after we get your sister, who’s gonna meet us at the end of this road? Your father or grandfather?” he asked. “A crazy prepper uncle?”
He clearly just wanted a distraction. But then, so did she. “I already told you. It’s just me and my sister. No family.”
“None at all?”
“Other than her, everyone who mattered is dead.” Which was true enough.
He took a swig of beer and alternated it with a bite of candy bar. “Who owns this safehouse of yours?”
“A friend.”
He cocked his brows. “A friend’s gonna share his hard-earned loot with you? With us? Don’t know many friends like that. Especially preppers. It’s every man for himself.”
Ezra would take them back. If she had faith in anything in this world, it was in him.
He’d forgive her. He had to.
“This one will.”
“The only preppers I’ve ever heard of are crazy. Paranoid out of their minds. He like that?”
“It’s not paranoia if you’re right.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, shutting out the desolation around her, the awful reality of smoke and the fire and the death. She thought of the warm and cozy cabin, of Ezra, gruff and grumpy but still a solid, comforting presence, a ray of brightness in the darkness of her memories.
She needed a good memory right now to anchor her, to sustain her. She was desperate for it. She let her mind drift back to that first night.
“You came through the only break in the fence,” Ezra had said later, once he’d shown her the booby traps in the yard that they’d miraculously avoided. The storm had knocked the tree into the fence the night before; Ezra had planned to repair it the next day.
The padlock had been left open; in her panic, she hadn’t even noticed.
Ezra had been in the middle of transferring a few soon-to-expire goods from storage to his pantry when the motion sensor lights flared to life.
He’d watched them on his cameras, Remington Versa Max 12-gauge shotgun in hand, ready and determined to defend his territory, as he had before. As he would again.
Something about them had stayed his hand—maybe because they’d only stolen what they needed, or because Eden was clearly still a child—or maybe their dreary clothing told its own dismal story.
Later, she’d discovered the photographs lining the hallway walls—all taken by his late wife, who’d died four years before of lung cancer.
The photos depicted the wildlife of the ‘Glades in their natural habitats: a wild boar snuffling in the dirt; egrets and herons taking flight over an expanse of dark water; a close-up of a bull gator’s massive, arrow-shaped head, his jagged-toothed maw hinged open; a hornbill sweeping its bill in the water, trawling for fish; a line of turtles sunning themselves on a moss-covered log; a diamondback rattler slithering through the pinelands.
Maybe it was the drawing that did it—a fragile, tenuous connection between these two desperate strangers and his dead wife.
Whatever his reasons, he’d decided to take them in.
Filled with a jumbled mix of trepidation and relief, Dakota had followed Ezra Burrows into the tin-roofed cabin that was surprisingly well-furnished for a hermit.
To her surprise, he’d laid Eden gently on his cracked leather sofa, mindless of the blood. So exhausted she could barely keep her eyes open, she’d knelt by the sofa, gripping Eden’s small hand, and watched as he cleaned and sutured the gash in her sister’s throat.
He gave her pills from a strange-looking bottle. He explained they were fish antibiotics, nearly as good as the high-priced stuff pharmaceutical companies sold for hundreds of bucks.
“Soon as she’s conscious, you’ll be on your way,” he growled, the flickering lamplight scoring his wrinkles in shadows deep as canyons.
The days passed. Eden regained consciousness, but her wound became inflamed. She burned with fever, her skin clammy, her eyes glassy and unfocused.
“I’m takin’ her to a hospital where she belongs,” he said more than once.
Each time, Dakota’s abject terror gave him pause.
“Anything but that,” she pleaded. “Just fix her. I’ll do anything.”
His scowl deepened. He never did call an ambulance. If Eden had worsened, he likely would have, but she didn’t. Slowly, over several days, Eden began to improve.
In between tending to Eden, Ezra put Dakota to work.
She helped peel and boil potatoes and carrots for a nutritious, easy-to-swallow broth.
She weeded his garden bursting with sweet potatoes, bell peppers, lima beans, cherry tomatoes, and okra—her time at the compound had already taught her the difference between plants and weeds—cleaned out the cages in the rabbit warren, and fed the chickens that wandered the property.
Ezra had a good setup. Even though they were in the middle of nowhere, solar panels on the roof supplied electricity. Ezra ran the stove and refrigerator on propane and used a pitcher pump to draw well water, along with several cisterns to collect rain.
A forty-foot antenna near the shed connected him to the rest of the world via ham radio.
On the third afternoon, she discovered the western side of the property. A fishing dock stretched out into the water. Several dozen yards away, paper targets fluttered over a tall stack of hay bales in a makeshift shooting range.
After a dinner of rabbit stew, she worked up the nerve to ask the question burning on her tongue. “Will you teach me to shoot?”
He watched her over the mug of his black coffee with flinty blue eyes. “What for?”
She considered her answer. “So I’m never helpless again.”
He set his mug down on the hand-hewn plank table. For a long moment, he was silent, staring down into the dark liquid, a tense, brooding expression on his wizened face.
“How did you get here?” he asked finally.
“There are people,” she started, her voice tremulous. If he knew who was after them, he’d kick them out for sure. But she couldn’t make herself lie to him. “They might be looking for us.”
“How did you get here?” he asked again, his voice hard.
“Airboat. We found the rotted dock and the old cabin—”
He rose without a word, seized his Remington from beside the door, and left.
He didn’t return for hours.
She hadn’t known where he’d gone until months later, when he finally told her he’d sunk the boat. He’d done it to keep them safe, to keep Maddox and the Shepherds away.