The Abandon Series | Book 1 | These Times of Abandon

by Schow, Ryan

  “C’mon,” she cried out.

  The lithium needed to fully be exposed to oxygen or it wouldn’t go, but if she could get it to erupt, Walker promised her the mother of all survival fires.

  This was going to work.

  It had to!

  She balled together the newspaper, then gathered the handful of twigs and bunched it up at her feet, ready to heap the pile on the flames, then protect it from the drizzle long enough to catch fire.

  She punched the blade into the battery two more times, and on the third try, smoke shot out like it was a punctured steam pipe. Leaning away from the eruption, she prayed for a flame. That’s when one appeared, almost like a mini flamethrower or a butane lighter.

  She grabbed the bunched kindling and dropped it on the battery, as well as the sticks she’d stripped earlier. The pile started smoking like crazy, but where did the flame go? She leaned as far forward as she dared to go and blew into the base of the kindling. All it took was one blow and the flames appeared.

  She used larger sticks to create a tee-pee formation over the flames, praying the fire would burn long enough to dry out and burn the sticks she’d gathered earlier.

  Glancing up through the trees, feeling the dripping of rain on her, she hoped the canopy would halt enough of the rain to give the fire a chance. The sticks she’d stripped eventually started to burn, which prompted her to add the rest of what she had.

  Rather than waiting for the fire to reach maturity, she ventured into the nearby brush to look for more wood. It was getting dark fast, though, so she kept the light of the fire in view as she rustled around the underbrush and scrub alike.

  As the last daylight burned off, she got her hands on a fallen branch buried beneath a heap of damp leaves. She pulled the seven-inch-thick branch free, then tried to drag it away. It was longer than she thought, eliciting a smile.

  She dragged the five-foot-long branch back to the fire, leaned it against a nearby tree, and began stomping it to pieces with her heel. When she was done, in the firelight, she inspected the broken branches for rot but didn’t find much at all. She laid a couple of the smaller pieces on the fire, tee-peeing them over sticks that were beginning to burn. The new wood ignited easily.

  There wasn’t a lot of timber to burn, but what she’d gathered would burn long enough for her to stay warm for a few hours. She tamed the fire as she ushered in the night. As she sat there getting dripped on by rain that had made its way down through the wet branches and onto her head and shoulders, she contemplated the weather, the day ahead, the roads she’d have to travel if she lasted the night.

  She thought she’d start to cry—she was desperate for that good cry—but she couldn’t make herself shed a tear. Something had happened to her that day. She’d grown up. She’d grown up so fast she actually felt numb to her once girlish emotions. Actually, she felt numb to just about everything right then.

  Naturally, her eyes traveled to the body at the edge of the clearing. Crowbar Man. Beneath the pulverized skull was an open mouth with a missing front tooth. She saw the gap when he was alive, when his liver-colored lips had parted for only a brief moment. Of all the things that bothered her the most, it was that missing front tooth. If that was the last thing she saw before he beat her to death, her life would have felt wasted.

  But then Aaron came along. Aaron who had been stalking her, even after she’d beat him up and warned him off. Hopefully, he’d learned his lesson. She’d sleep close to her Glock in case he hadn’t, and if that was the case—if she saw him again—she would just shoot him and get it over with.

  There was no way she could’ve done something like this before, but after shooting Crowbar Man and seeing him still pressing forward, she was pretty sure she could now shoot Aaron.

  Putting her filthy hands over the fire, warming them, her eyes went to the body once more. She had aimed the weapon at his head. Would she have pulled the trigger? If her answer was yes, then she had indeed changed.

  For a moment, she wondered if she hadn’t grown up, if she’d just grown dark. But wasn’t that what this new world called for? Violence to stave off violence? Would she live a reactionary existence, or would she kill first and second-guess the situation later? One seemed safer than the other.

  Staring at Crowbar Man’s flattened head, she knew she would have pulled that trigger. She actually wanted to for what he was trying to do to her. Technically, however, that would make her a murderer.

  No, self-defense, she thought.

  She wasn’t unhinged, something fundamental in her hadn’t broken, she just understood the stakes better. The game of life had changed. There was no going back to the way things were, not if what the nation was experiencing was an EMP attack.

  Gathering up what facts she knew, she was sure it was an EMP, which meant the days ahead—if she survived that long—would be the worst, most challenging days of her life. And it wouldn’t get better. Not any time soon. Not for anyone.

  While she tried to imagine the levels of depravity that were sure to follow the collapse of society, she felt parts of her brain pulling apart from each other, the pain of contemplation creating within her panic, anxiety, and a sheer emotional horror she could not explain let alone comprehend.

  Distancing herself from her own thoughts, she compartmentalized her feelings, putting all the dark and scary emotions into a box she slid into the back of her mind. In their place, she allowed one solitary task to occupy the forefront of her thoughts: she had to get to Niles.

  If she could just get to him in Melbourne, she’d be okay, right? Will and Ramira weren’t city folk. They were like her parents—prepared.

  Well, sort of. No one could really prepare for an EMP. There was only speculation about what the world would look like after an EMP. There was the societal unrest, which the nation had been experiencing for nearly two years now, but then there was the element of survival without food, running water, electricity, or heat. Everyone knew the stats: within a year, ninety percent of the affected area would die. But were those stats accurate? She hoped not. If the US was nearly three hundred and fifty million people when you considered the true population, that meant three hundred and fifteen million people would die inside of a year.

  She felt those boxed, shelved emotions trying to break free again. As her anxiety overtook her, she did her best to mentally balance herself, to keep those fears buried. A person’s entire life could be consumed with fear, but what good would that do? With fear came inaction, and with inaction came stagnancy, capitulation, and death. Fear was the conquering force. Fear was the enemy.

  In today’s world, if real-life followed the charts created by the EMP commissions of days past, then you either lived off the land and your farm, or you didn’t live on anything and you basically starved to death. Those who knew how to live off their resources would survive; those who didn’t…well, they were better off eating a bullet.

  Leighton wanted to survive. Even if the world went to absolute ruin, she was committed to living, to surviving, to adapting. Turning her hands over to warm the other sides of them, she no longer looked at Crowbar Man. His soul was surely gone, sucked down into hell where guys like him who went after girls like her belonged.

  After a while, the ever-pressing rain died down and eventually stopped. By then she was warm enough and tired enough to turn in for the night. In the lean-to, she rolled out her sleeping bag, slipped her shoes off, then crawled inside and got as comfortable as she could.

  On a scale of one to ten—one being as uncomfortable as all get out and ten being in a luxury bed at a five-star hotel—the backpack and the uneven ground rated a solid one and a half.

  Closing her eyes, she told herself she needed the rest.

  Before long, she drifted off.

  Throughout the night, as she tossed and turned and fought to find that comfortable spot that was not there, she slipped in and out of sleep. When she was awake and shifting, she wondered if the damage being done as she lay there on he
r back and hips was worse than the damage she’d do to her feet by walking straight to Niles’s house. But then she was woken up to a ferocious gust.

  She opened her eyes in time to see the lean-to being ripped away, sucked into a huge funnel of wind. Freaking out, scrambling out of her sleeping bag, the wind slashed and tore at her skin, clothes, and hair. Leaves and sticks pelted her, the silent roar far beyond alarming.

  She grabbed her shoes and stuffed her feet into them, not bothering to tie the laces. Quickly, she grabbed her backpack and her paint gun, cinching them both on her back.

  As she scrambled across the clearing, the winds blew her off her feet twice. The first time, she was lifted up and then fell beside Crowbar Man. The second time, she felt invisible hands grab-grab-grabbing at her, pulling at her legs and arms, spinning her around and rolling her over the dead body.

  A two-second break in the gale-force winds allowed her to scramble into the brush where she fought hard to dig in.

  Was the tornado directly overhead? Or was this just the edge of it? She knew the damage one of these things could do, so she knew she wasn’t in it yet.

  The winds continued to churn, turning raindrops and dirt into bullets.

  Lying on her belly, she wiggled around, driving herself into the earth as far as she could, wanting to become part of the ground. When she had fully settled into the brush, she grabbed hold of two different trunks belonging to two different bushes. Her hair was thrashing about, the push-and-pull pressure on her body like nothing she’d ever felt before. Dirt, sticks, and various other debris tore past her, lashing her clothes and skin, forcing her to close her eyes and mouth. She held on for dear life, the task becoming increasingly difficult under such brutal winds.

  She felt the winds trying to suck her body into the air, as if a giant cosmic vacuum was working to swallow her into the heavens. Hooking her feet into the scrub, she was desperate and scared, but certain her efforts would not be enough.

  They weren’t.

  The winds whipped and roiled, grating over her, tearing at her clothes, at the vegetation around her, at the very ground to which she was clinging spread-eagled.

  One minute the winds died down, and she felt she might survive, but then the next minute they were back with even more force than ever.

  She started to pray, because that was all she had, and then she worried she would never see her parents again, or her brother and sister. Niles would miss her if she was pulled into the sky and tossed to her death, or battered to oblivion by debris in the filthy cyclone high in the sky. But it was her family she thought of most at that moment.

  Suddenly trees and brush were being ripped out of the ground all around her. The great cosmic vacuum cleaner then sucked her into the sky, its winds churning her, rolling her, carrying her up into a whipping black void.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Hudson Croft

  Hudson gently nudged his way to the front of the hoodlum-gathering, earning a bit of grumbling and some harsh looks, but not really caring so long as he put his eyes on the scumbag in charge. When he saw him, he almost laughed. The guy was shorter than Hudson would have imagined for being the head honcho, but his voice was powerful, his words measured, and his eyes steely and charged.

  “This guy’s a one-man cheerleading squad,” Hudson said to the girl next to him.

  Turning her yellowish eyes on him, he realized she didn’t have any eyebrows, and her nose was pierced with a hoop from which an upside-down cross hung freely.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  Hudson turned away from her, sickened by the fumes of disdain seeping out of her. He imagined her not as a body with the soul of a girl who was once a child—this thing loved by a single mother or a devoted father—but as something foul trapped in a skin suit decorated in jewelry meant to terrify, to embolden, to pay homage to the first real radical.

  Instead of thinking about this brush with evil, he turned his attention to the pep rally Short Stack was holding. People hung on this turd’s every word, idolizing him, revering him. Every sentence was an inverted eulogy to America, a promise for a world less ordered, more chaotic, a world where freedom among the masses was equal because you took what you wanted and if you got stopped, the lines were drawn, and that was the nature of a dog-eat-dog world.

  Hands went up, fists pumped, the energy rippled through them all, catching him in a pool of dark energy the likes of which Hudson had never experienced before. These people wanted to destroy everything in their paths. It reminded him of a lecture he’d heard about demons when he was a child and still went to church.

  “Demons aren’t like you and me,” the pastor had said, supercharged, his voice booming off the ornate chapel walls. Shaking a fist of his own, he said, “These putrid souls devour the fears of saints, they take some kind of masturbatory delight in disorder, they are at home in the filth they create. Whatever hostile webs your nightmares weave, however deep they lead you into darkness, the hell at the bottom of this pit is their Valhalla! You sinning, hating, and dying is the food they need to live. Evil is their sustenance. Rage is their fuel!”

  These people all around Short Stack—these creatures of bedlam who were frothing at the mouth at the idea of tearing the nation down—strained their voices in unison, chanting as one vile force. Together, they radiated dark energy, a sickening charge that ran right though Hudson.

  As he watched this pint-sized demon break into a chant—this five-foot-two-inch goblin-creature cheerleading the apocalypse—all Hudson wanted was to pull his gun, fire just one bullet, make all that hateful noise stop.

  Soon the beast lifted his arms and commanded his audience. The chanting halted. Boisterous voices fell to a whisper, and then they fell into complete silence. The cult-like behavior was startling, to say the least. He fought the urge to take in his surroundings, but Hudson knew that if he wanted to stand out, he’d do just that. Instead, he stood there among the masses, mimicking reverence, acting like he too, hung on this beast’s every word.

  Tiny toons changed tack, now barking out orders the horde seemed to enjoy. They started to chant again and Hudson chanted with them.

  “One voice, one head, America is all but dead! One voice, one head, America is all but dead!”

  Hudson rose his fist and joined the masses. He hated himself for what he was doing, but with each chant, with each pump of his fist, he vowed to put an end to this, if not the entire horde, at least to this one man. If he could banish this half-pint abomination, then his life would have been worth something.

  After the chants died down, this tiny tyrant said, “The one who killed our brethren before the EMP, if you can find him, if you can bring him to me, dead or alive, you will have the first pick of the spoils—a woman, man, or a child of your choosing. You will be gifted with a night to exercise your darker more libidinous desires.”

  A thunder of cheers and chants all but shook the street beneath his feet. They were speaking of him. It was his head Short Stack wanted on a pike.

  Seeing this unfolding before his very eyes, he suddenly missed the old days when peaceful protests were the best answer to inequality. Back in those days, real causes were fought for in the streets by real people who only wanted a more equal society, the preservation of freedom, a voice at the big table, so to speak.

  Those days were long gone.

  Apolitical mongrels like these craved destruction, vindictiveness, the end of a free and fair society, and he was about to fall in with them. But he was not one of them. He was a chameleon, a Trojan Horse, a vigilante with retribution in his heart and slaughter on his mind.

  They dispersed and he joined them, a small group heading out to look for…him. They poured through the neighborhoods like a spreading cancer, kicking down doors and gates, searching homes, garages, and backyards, looking for the killer that was Hudson Croft.

  When his little group ventured into a large backyard away from the others, he said, “Hey, check this out,” near what looked like an o
ut-of-commission tornado cellar.

  The small pack of demons he’d been traveling with gathered around the cellar door. When one of them bent over and tried to pull on the padlock, Hudson stabbed him in the kidney with his knife.

  Before the others could react, he stuck them too, giving new meaning to the term stick-and-move. As soon as he had incapacitated the small group, before they could call for help, he slit their throats and left them to join the next group. By then, the winds had picked up and a light rain began to fall.

  He’d ransacked a few more backyards and a large garage with a new group of deviants when the dark skies dropped and the wind picked up. The light rain became fat raindrops. With the gusting wind and the heavy deluge, the lot of them were soaked and miserable.

  The tiny tyrant finally rounded them up and said, “Finish what you’re doing and head back to home base!” Home base was the almost-torched volunteer fire department.

  Hudson thought about going in with them but decided he wouldn’t want to sit with those froggy snotballs and not be able to execute every last one of them. Strategically, he hung back, and when he could, he broke away from the crowd and headed to his own home.

  The ever increasing winds gusted cold and the rain persisted, but then—in the distance—Hudson saw what looked like a tornado forming over Cincinnati.

  From his front porch, he watched a funnel form, the tail reaching down into the city like the finger of a vengeful God. He ran around back and climbed onto his roof, watching the forming funnel as long as he could.

  The winds became ferocious, though, tearing up plants and bending the younger trees, causing street signs to shudder. He was barely able to get back off the roof and inside when the full force of the storm hit.

  For a long time, he sat next to his friend’s body, listening to the house creak and groan. The rain pelted sideways against the glass, and the cold gathered inside the walls around him, turning his abode into a veritable icebox.