Edric punched her cheek, the blow numbing her already swollen face, immunizing her to the next vicious hit. He grabbed her collar, lifting her up, and she saw two faces circling around in her field of vision. “You’re a dead woman.” He shoved her back down, and her head slammed against the concrete. He kicked the end of Doug’s chin and knocked him away before he could reach the rifle. Edric picked it up and tucked it under his arm. “And once I kill you and your husband, I’m going to hunt down your kids. I’m not going to rest until I’ve erased every last shred of your family from this earth.”
Wren lifted her head, rolling to her side, and brought her hands to her back, looking as though she was cradling the pain Edric had inflicted, but her hand wrapped around the lump at her waist. She looked to Doug, whose mouth bled, and the two made eye contact.
“And when I kill them, I’ll be sure to let them know that it was their mother that let this happen to them.” Edric aimed the rifle at Wren, his finger on the trigger. “I can’t wait to see the look on their faces.”
“You won’t get the chance.”
Doug lunged at Edric once more, and he spun around, shooting Doug in the head. The distraction lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough to give Wren time to pull the pin on the grenade. She released the lever and tossed it toward Edric and then scrambled in the opposite direction. She heard him shout something, but in her frantic pace she couldn’t decipher it. She made it two steps when the sounds of the gunshots suddenly intermixed with a pain in her back, and she felt her body run cold as she collapsed to the ground. The adrenaline subsided, and the last thing Wren remembered hearing was the explosion that ripped Edric to pieces.
34
One Month Later
Iris paced the floor restlessly. Ben sat in the corner, frozen. Nathan drummed his fingers nervously on the table’s surface. All three of them had the same anxiety etched on their faces, though the roots of their apprehension differed.
“I don’t like it.” Iris stopped, saying the words aloud to the room as much as herself. “I don’t like the idea at all. It’s too soon for something like this.”
“Everybody’s for it,” Ben replied. “It’s what she would have wanted.” The mustache on his upper lip curved downward. “And if we’re going to do it, then we need to start now.”
“Ben’s right,” Nathan replied, chiming in, ceasing the percussive drumming. “We haven’t had any contact from anyone on the outside since Edric was killed. We don’t know who’s out there, and we need to find out. We need to start establishing a connection.”
“And what happens when people want what we have?” Iris raised her eyebrows. The grey in her hair had whitened, and the age lines across her face had grown more prominent. “We’ve just got this place back on its feet.”
“All the more reason to start now.” Nathan stood. “We’re stronger than we were before. We can help.”
“It’s what she would have wanted,” Ben said.
Iris lowered her head. “I know.” She rubbed the creases on her forehead, the loose skin rolling between her fingers. “All right.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We’ll start sending scouts to look for people. But we do not make contact until we’ve observed them. I don’t want us taking any chances with anyone until they’ve been fully vetted.”
“Agreed,” Nathan said.
Ben nodded and softly repeated to himself that it was what she would have wanted. The three of them left their chambers and stepped back out into the town hall. Their population was less than half of what it was when they arrived, but the fence had been finished, supplies had been recalculated, and they still had more than enough to last for a few years.
Iris smacked her gavel, calling everyone to order. “We have listened to and heard everyone’s opinion. And based off of the community’s voice, we shall start looking for others to bring to the camp. Anyone that comes to us will be given asylum, but thoroughly vetted and closely monitored.” She reached for the gavel but hesitated. She twirled it in her hands then set it down. “I know many of you were moved by what Wren Burton did for this community. By all she sacrificed. Humanity should never be something that’s lost in times of crisis. It should only be strengthened. Our actions shape us. How we conduct ourselves will shape the future. And though she is gone, we will keep her spirit within all of us.” She lowered her head, a smile gracing her lips at Wren’s memory, then smacked the gavel.
Reuben cracked his knuckles then turned the spit outside the cabin. The four rabbits crackled, and the grease from the meat sizzled into the fire below. Chloe sat on his right, while Addison was on his left. “Should be done soon.”
“I’m starving.” Chloe threw her head back and overexaggerated the throwing of her arms. “It smells so good.” She leaned closer, but Reuben pulled her back.
“Easy now. We don’t want to cook you.” Reuben patted her on the back and reached for the spit, slowly, still recovering from his fight back in town. He tore into the charred flesh, and determined with a satisfied grunt that it was done. “All right. Time to eat. Zack!”
A log split in two, the axe wedged right in the middle. Zack looked over from the logs of firewood and limped over, his leg still acclimating to the freedom from his cast, not all of his strength completely returned. “Smells good.” He took a seat next to Addison, wiping his hands on his jeans, then playfully wiped them on Addison’s hair, which triggered a squeal and a giggle.
“All right. That’s enough, you two,” Reuben said. “Chloe, why don’t you run inside and get the rest of the party, huh?”
“Okay.” Chloe jumped to her feet and sprinted as fast as her tiny legs allowed. Before she went inside, she ran her fingers over the old bullet holes in the cabin walls and then pushed the door open. The cabin had grown even smaller from the sudden increase in occupants, but never had it felt more like a home. “Mom, food’s ready.”
Wren looked up from the pistol on the table and smiled. “I’ll be out in a minute.” Chloe disappeared back outside, and Wren tucked the pistol in her holster and pushed up from the chair gingerly. Bandages protruded from the collar of her shirt and she walked slowly, the effort of breathing still difficult from the gunshot wounds.
Outside, Wren found a seat next to Zack. The girls split one of the rabbits, while Reuben, Zack, and she had their own. She closed her eyes as she bit into the meat and cleaned every last morsel off the bones. Once they were done, the kids played, and Zack returned to the firewood. “If you get tired, sit down. Don’t push it too hard.”
“I know, Mom.”
“He’ll be okay,” Reuben said, tossing the bones into a pile. “You’re sure you still want to go tomorrow?” He raised his eyebrows. The wounds on his face had mostly healed, and the beard helped cover up what hadn’t.
“Yeah. It’s time.” After the attack on the camp and Edric’s death, she awoke in the infirmary with her kids surrounding her and Reuben sitting in the corner. It was nearly an hour before all the tears had dried. Once Doug was buried, they left the community and returned to Reuben’s cabin. Though Iris and the others were more than supportive of having them stay, she couldn’t. It was a part of her life she needed closed. And with Reuben’s help and a large supply crate from the community, they had everything they needed. And even if they didn’t, the community was only a day’s journey. “We’ll start with some of the smaller towns. See what we find there.”
“It’s risky. We don’t know what it’s like out there anymore.”
Wren watched the girls play, chasing after one another with sticks, then looked to Zack splitting wood. Everything had changed. But they needed to move forward. “It doesn’t matter what we’ll find. Whatever it is, we’ll be okay. If it’s broken, we’ll rebuild it.” She turned to Reuben and smiled. “It’s time to start putting the pieces back together.”
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The Coldest Night
1
“Hey, Jack, did you hear the news?” Bill asked, leaning his torso through the office door.
“Uh, about the president? I think I read the article yesterday, yeah,” Jack murmured disinterestedly, barely paying attention to his boss. His eyes were locked on his computer screen as he rotated the complex, three-dimensional mechanical object in his design program.
“No, no, it’s not about politics,” Bill said, squeezing himself through the half-closed door.
Jack sighed and only barely managed to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. He hated being disturbed while he was in the middle of a project, especially one that required as much concentration as the present one. He enjoyed his job immensely; it was suitably challenging and rewarding. Ironically enough, the biggest obstacle to productivity he faced was his boss’s frequent visits to his office, most of which consisted of idle chatter and office gossip. Still, as much as Bill’s interruptions bothered him, he never said anything. He knew Bill was in a bad place after going through a difficult divorce, so he always tried to be compassionate and understanding when Bill came wandering in. Jack minimized the design program, smiled as his gaze fell upon his desktop background—a photograph of his beautiful wife and teenage daughter taken on a Hawaiian beach on their yearly family vacation—and then looked up at Bill.
“So, what’s the big news, Bill?” he asked.
“There’s a superstorm rolling in,” Bill answered excitedly. Although the body around them was unmistakably that of a heavyset middle-aged man, the eyes in his chubby face sparkled with boyish anticipation.
“A superstorm?” Jack’s reaction to the news was markedly different than Bill’s. The smile faded from his craggy face, replaced by a look of consternation. “How bad are we talking?”
“They’re calling it ‘The Valentine’s Day Blizzard’ because it’s supposed to hit sometime tomorrow, the 14th, but that name doesn’t do it any justice, not from what I’ve heard.” Bill had a strangely maniacal glint in his eyes, almost as if he were ready to welcome whatever chaos the superstorm would bring. “I’ve just been reading up on it now. One website says it’s gonna be the biggest storm in a generation. I’m talking entire buildings buried under snow, the city totally cut off and isolated. It’s supposed to hit us harder than anywhere else—well, here and the mountains. Hey, don’t you have that brother who lives way up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere? You think he’ll be okay?”
“Arthur will be just fine,” Jack said. “He’s lived up there on his own the better part of thirty years now. He’s survived many blizzards in his cabin.”
“Not like this one,” Bill said.
“I knew a blizzard was coming in, but this is the first I’ve heard of it being a superstorm. Are you sure that isn’t, well, fake news or sensationalism or something?” Jack asked.
“I’m sure,” Bill said. “They upgraded it to superstorm category just about an hour ago. It’s on multiple websites and news stations if you don’t believe me. Apparently, it’s picking up strength at an unprecedented speed, behaving unlike any storm they’ve seen for twenty or thirty years.”
“That’s not good,” Jack murmured, half to himself, lost in a sudden tempest of worrying thoughts in his mind. “That’s not good at all…”
“Yeah, looks like it’s gonna be a real doozy,” Bill said, still oddly excited about the prospect of a massive blizzard hitting them. “I’m letting everyone go home early this afternoon, you know, to get ready for the storm and all that. So if you want to head out now, Jack, I—”
The office was suddenly plunged into darkness, causing Bill to pause, and an eerie silence filled the gloomy space. The constant hum and low whirr of printers and other office machines were gone.
“Ooh, power outage,” Bill said. “Let me check and see if it’s got something to do with the storm.”
Jack already had out his phone, though, and had noted, with no small measure of trepidation, that the device was dead.
“That’s weird,” Bill said slowly. “My phone’s—”
“Dead, I know,” Jack said warily. He suspected that this was something far worse than a mere power outage. It likely had nothing to do with the incoming blizzard, which would be the cherry on top of a terrible situation if his suspicions about the apparent power outage were correct.
“What are the odds of that?” Bill said. “Both our phones dying at the exact same time. We should buy some lottery tickets, huh?”
“It’s nobody’s lucky day today, Bill, trust me on this,” Jack said, getting up from his desk. His actions were slow and deliberate, but his mind was racing, and a million anxious thoughts were bouncing around in his head. First and foremost among his concerns, though, were his wife and daughter.
“I don’t see why the storm would have affected the power if it’s still way out at sea now, though,” Bill mused, oblivious to the reality of what was actually going on.
“The storm has nothing to do with this,” Jack said, “and it’s no power outage, not if my theory is correct.”
“Your theory? What else could this be?” Bill asked, sounding worried for the first time rather than excited.
Jack walked over to his office window, which looked out over the whole city from the twentieth floor of this building and opened the blinds. Sunlight streamed in from the clear afternoon, and the blue skies carried no hint of the coming weather. Bill walked over to the window and followed Jack’s gaze fixed on the nearest intersection below them, one of the biggest in the city and one of the city’s main traffic arteries.
When Bill saw what Jack was staring at, he let out a low whistle. “That’s one hell of a pileup,” he murmured. “Worst I’ve ever seen! There must be over twenty cars all smashed together in there! All the traffic lights must have gone out. But you know people in this city, worst drivers in America, absolute maniacs, the lot of ‘em, and—”
“It’s not just at the intersection, Bill,” Jack said. His voice was calm, but inside his chest, his heart was hammering. Everything felt surreal and dreamlike … or, rather, nightmarish.
Bill looked more closely and saw traffic accidents everywhere; on every street they could see from up here, there were pileups and collisions, and not a single vehicle was moving. Every one of them was either completely stationary or had collided with another car or a lamppost.
“Listen,” Jack said, opening the window.
“I don’t hear anything,” Bill said.
“Exactly,” Jack said as he walked away from the window and went back to his desk. There was an item in it that he had been keeping there for a while, that he now knew he would need.
While Jack was doing this, it hit Bill; with all these car accidents, the air should have been thick with the sound of wailing sirens … yet there was nothing. The usual city hubbub, with its constant drone of traffic, interspersed with the pulsing of deep bass from loud music, and the hum and whirr of countless machines, was gone. In its place was a surreal silence, broken only by human voices.
“My God,” Bill whispered, struck by the terrible revelation of what Jack was pointing out. “What’s … what’s really going on, Jack? What is this?” He was scarcely able to comprehend
or process what he saw, but he understood on a deep, instinctual level, that this was some sort of cataclysmic disaster, one that he couldn’t begin to wrap his head around.
“I think that what’s happened,” Jack said slowly, feeling strangely calm despite understanding the immense severity of this situation, “is that we’ve been hit with an EMP.”
“EMP? What on earth is that?” Bill asked.
Jack was about to explain when a blinding flash blazed a shear of light across the horizon. Something dazzlingly bright, like a horizonal meteor, streaked through the air, and a few seconds later, a deep, ominous boom resounded across the city.
“What on earth was that?” Bill murmured, his jaw hanging open and his eyes wide with shock.
Before Jack could voice any theories about what they’d seen, more streaks blazed through the air, and a series of deep, concussive booms echoed across the city. They were missiles or rockets of some sort; Jack was sure of it. He knew now, without a doubt, that the city, perhaps the entire nation, was under attack … and his wife and child were out there in the midst of the madness. The eerie silence changed abruptly in tone; even from here, twenty floors up, Jack and Bill could hear the screams of terror and panic from below.
“I have to go,” Jack muttered. “Get everyone out of here, Bill—now. Make sure you tell them all to go straight home and stay there. You do the same.”
“B–but, where are you going?” Bill stammered.
“To save my wife and child,” Jack said calmly.
“But, uh, oh God, oh my God!” Bill suddenly yelled, his voice shrill with abrupt terror.
Jack barely had time to turn around before he was blinded by a brilliant flash, accompanied by a deafening blast that hurled him across the office with brutal force. He was unconscious before his body even hit the floor, and a thick darkness swallowed him up as if he were wrapped up tight in a wet, suffocating blanket.
Survive the Day Boxset: EMP Survival in a Powerless World Page 53