He and Bernie arrived at the river. The snowfall was so thick and intense that they couldn’t see the opposite bank. Indeed, they could barely see a few yards ahead of them. There were two major bridges, roughly a mile each from where he and Bernie were now.
“What do we do now, jump in and swim?” Bernie asked, chuckling.
Jack wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “You look that way; I’ll head this way. Call out if you find a boat moored anywhere, I’ll do that same. Rowboats only, nothing with a motor.”
“Okay, yeah, I’ll do that,” Bernie said.
He and Jack set off in opposite directions, searching the banks of the river for boats. Soon enough, an excited yell cut through the whipping blanket of white snow from Bernie’s direction. “Found one! It’s got oars and everything!”
Jack ran over to him, but his boost of optimism took a bit of a knock when he saw what Bernie had found. It was a rubber dinghy with a small motor, and the oars it had in it were only small supplementary paddles. Still, even though it wasn’t perfect, it was a means to cross the river.
“Be careful getting into that,” Jack cautioned. “You wouldn’t want to capsize it and end up falling in the water, not in weather like this.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice!” Bernie remarked.
They carefully climbed into the dinghy, which rocked and swayed and lurched alarmingly, but nonetheless stayed the right way up. Once the two of them were in place, Jack handed Bernie one of the small plastic paddles, and they set off. The going was slow and took a lot of effort, but they made steady, tiring progress.
When they were around halfway across the river, though, Jack noticed a dark shape on the water, nothing more than a vague shadow barely visible in the driving snow, but he knew he wasn’t seeing things. He reached out and grabbed Bernie’s arm, preventing him from dipping his oar into the water. “Hold on,” he whispered. “I think that’s a boat coming toward us.”
“You sure?” Bernie asked. “I don’t see nothin’, and I don’t hear anything except this damn wind that’s freezin’ my nuts off.”
“Get down,” Jack hissed, his voice low with urgency. “Move, dammit, lie down flat. Do it!” He flattened himself on the bottom of the dinghy and grabbed Bernie’s jacket and pulled him down, too.
Bernie pressed himself down on the bottom, too, only just managing to squeeze his bulk in flat next to Jack’s lean figure. They waited in tense suspense, for a while, hearing only the moaning howl of the wind and the gentle lapping of waves against the dinghy. Then, however, just as Bernie opened his mouth to say something, they heard it—the sound of voices. And they were close, far too close to have been drifting across the water from the riverbanks.
“We picked one hell of a day for the revolution,” Jack and Bernie heard a man say.
“The commanders know what they’re doing. They’re planning on using the blizzard to our advantage,” another man said.
Jack listened closely, and in addition to the sound of the men talking, he could hear the rhythmic dipping of oars into the water. With luck, the soldiers’ boat would pass by without them noticing the dinghy in the water. Jack knew that he couldn’t rely solely on luck, though, and he gripped the M-16 loosely in his hands as he lay on his back, ready to whip it into action at a moment’s notice.
“I don’t see what the point in patrolling this river is,” the first soldier grumbled. “I can’t see for shit, and who cares if a couple of civilians swim across or row boats across.”
“It’s not civilians the commanders care about; that’s why we can shoot ‘em on sight if we want. We’re looking for the bigwigs who think they can escape what’s coming to ‘em. Those bastards know that they’re gonna hang, and they’ll try anything to escape their fate.”
The voices were growing fainter, and Jack was about to breathe out a sigh of relief, for it seemed that they had escaped without being noticed. However, just before he released this sigh, one of the soldiers said something that sent dread coursing through his veins.
“Hey! Is that a boat?”
Inside the dinghy, both Jack and Bernie froze up. “Keep still, and be very, very quiet,” Jack whispered. “Don’t move, don’t even breathe.”
“I don’t know. I can’t see anything,” the other soldier said.
“I swear I saw a boat,” the first soldier insisted. “This fucking snow, can’t see a fucking thing!”
For a few tense moments, there was silence from the soldiers’ boat, and Jack was sure that they were peering through the snow, trying to catch a glimpse of the dinghy. However, a fresh, powerful gust of wind brought a flurry of thick snow, which was enough to screen the dinghy from the soldiers’ eyes effectively. For once, the terrible weather was on Jack’s side.
“I guess it was nothing,” he heard the first soldier say, his voice faint over the roar of the wind. Then the soldiers’ voices grew fainter and fainter until they vanished altogether.
He and Bernie waited for a few more minutes until they were sure it was safe, and then they sat up and picked up the oars again.
“Whew, that was a close call,” Bernie murmured. “What in the hell is going on? Those guys were talking about a revolution. Who the hell are they? The whole world’s gone nuts.”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to stick around to find out,” Jack muttered.
He and Bernie managed to get to the other side of the river without incident, and there they said a brief farewell and parted ways. Jack had found Bernie to be annoying and more of a hindrance than an ally, but nevertheless, he was glad he had helped him. Bernie had a good heart for all his flaws, and Jack hoped that the security guard would survive the turmoil and chaos that was about to be unleashed in earnest.
Now he had a mile to go before he got home, but what would he find there? The weather was steadily worsening, and the reasonable period for Kate and Susan to have waited for him had long since passed. In his heart, he knew that Kate had left already—she had to have, for the sake of Susan’s survival if nothing else—and he was mentally and emotionally preparing himself for the terrible fate of being trapped in this city when the superstorm hit and the terrorists turned it into a killing zone.
“No,” he whispered to himself. “I’m not giving up. Not yet.”
He took off at a run, then broke into a sprint. He no longer gave a damn about stealth or strategy; all he cared about was getting back to his wife and child, making it to them against all the odds. He pushed himself, racing through the streets as fast as he could, breathing hard with his heart drumming madly in his chest and his throat and lungs burning, and his muscles on fire.
Then, as he got to the familiar street that their apartment building was on, he heard it, over the howling wind. It was a sound he knew very well: the deep rumble of his Humvee. It was coming up the street, and he knew it had to be them. It had to be. Using his last reserves of energy, he sprinted up the road and through the washes of snow on the wind. Two headlights were coming toward him. He stood in the middle of the street, right in the Humvee’s path, with a rifle in his hands and a smile on his lips. Against all the odds, he had made it.
He had found them.
20
Kate stared in sheer disbelief through the windshield, and for a few moments, she was convinced that she had to be hallucinating. It was Jack standing there in the middle of the road; she knew that face like she knew the back of her hand. Yet he was wearing a soldier’s jacket and carrying an M-16. Was it really Jack, or was her troubled mind simply projecting her husband’s face onto the body of some random soldier?
“Dad!” Susan shrieked from the back seat. “Oh my God, oh my God, it’s Dad! It’s Dad!”
Kate knew then that she imagining things. “Open the door, honey!” she said excitedly. “Let him in!”
Susan threw open the door and ran out into the wind and snow. She ran over to Jack and threw her arms around him, weeping tears of joy. Jack hugged her tightly, and tears stung the corners of his e
yes, too. He slipped the fingers of his left hand through Susan’s, and hand in hand, they walked over to the Humvee.
“Jack,” Kate gasped, still scarcely able to believe that he was real and not some apparition her mind had conjured up. “I can’t believe it. We thought you were … we thought you had…”
“It’s a long story,” he said, “and I’m a little black and blue, but nothing some rest won’t heal. Who’s this?” he asked, not in an unfriendly manner but surprised to see someone else in the Humvee.
“My name’s Nick, sir,” Nick said, offering Jack a hand, which he took and shook.
“Nick saved my life,” Kate explained. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him. We’ve also got a story to tell you.”
“They’re just giving me a ride home,” Nick said.
“Well, I thought maybe we could take you a little farther than that,” Kate said with a smile, “but we’ll talk about that later. Jack, how are you feeling? Do you want me to drive, or do you want to take over?”
“I’ve spent years working on this thing,” he said, flashing her a grin of boyish delight. “Don’t deny me the chance to drive her the way I designed her to be driven, honey!”
Kate chuckled, glad to see that Jack was relatively uninjured and that his spirits were high and his will strong. “Of course, come on, let’s trade places.” She got out, and then she and Jack shared a long, tight embrace and a passionate kiss before swapping sides.
As Jack drove, he told them what had happened to him—everything from almost being blown up in his office from one of the rocket attacks to the hostage situation down to having to paddle a flimsy dinghy across the river. Then Kate, Susan, and Nick told him their story, from Kate’s near-drowning in the river to their own hostage situation in the martial arts gym. By the time they’d finished swapping stories, they were out in the suburbs.
The drive out of their neighborhood was filled with obstacles in the form of piled up cars. Still, Jack usually had plenty of room to get around them by driving on the sidewalks. And, also, when the occasion called for it, he simply drove over dead cars’ hoods or trunks, for if they were the size of the average sedan or city car, his modified Humvee was easily capable of doing this.
“I had no idea I could have done that,” Kate remarked the first time he drove over a BMW sedan that was blocking most of a sidewalk. “And it’s a good thing I didn’t; if I’d known I could have simply driven over the cars that were blocking the street around the corner from home, we wouldn’t have turned around and gone back that way, and we wouldn’t have found you.”
“We’ve got someone watching over us,” Jack said, smiling.
He was concerned about the fact that the Humvee’s headlights might attract attention of the wrong kind, but driving without them was a sheer impossibility, given that visibility in the darkness and driving wind and snow was pretty much zero. Also, the winds had picked up to well over gale force, and the howling roar as the wind tore through the streets and alleys drowned out the sound of the Humvee’s motor to anyone who wasn’t within a few yards of the vehicle.
Thankfully, they didn’t attract any of the wrong kind of attention on the way out of the city. Jack kept to small roads and stayed well away from any of the main routes, and when it came to getting out of the city and into the suburbs, instead of taking the roads that led there, he drove the Humvee through the large park that separated the city from the western suburbs. The park was thick with snow, which had already piled up a few inches. Jack guessed there would be many feet of snow by morning, possibly even enough to bury some of the smaller trees.
Once they got into the suburbs, there were fewer signs of the chaos and violence that had devastated the city—there weren’t nearly as many abandoned cars choking up the roads, and there weren’t any corpses on the streets or signs of fighting—but there was one major clue that revealed that things were far from normal: the darkness.
Jack, Kate, and Susan were accustomed to experiencing true darkness without any hint of artificial light, from their frequent camping trips to the mountains, and their occasional visits to Arthur’s cabin, but Nick, who had only been camping a handful of times in his life, hadn’t experienced anything like it. For all of them, though, this sort of intense darkness was surreal to see in the suburbs. In one or two houses they passed, the dim light of gas lamps could be seen burning, but most houses were shells of utter blackness.
They drove through the suburbs in a silence that was heavily laden with a feeling of surreal dread. It truly felt as if this were some sort of bizarre collective dream they were experiencing … one from which there was no possibility of waking.
After a while, Nick spoke up. “My studio apartment is about a mile up that road,” he said, pointing to a road branching off the one they were on.
Kate wondered what she should say. When she’d first thought of asking Nick to accompany them to Arthur’s cabin in the mountains, she hadn’t been entirely sure that Jack would be with them, or whether he would make it out of the city. After she’d left her apartment for the last time, she’d been sure that Jack was gone forever. By then, she’d convinced herself that she needed to do whatever she could to convince Nick to stay with them, just for the sake of having a male presence to make potential predators—which she was sure they would eventually encounter on the road—think twice about attacking her and Susan. Now that Jack had returned, even though Nick would be an asset and an ally, she wondered what she should say. It wasn’t as if she and Jack would have an opportunity to have a private conversation about it.
Before she could open her mouth, though, Jack spoke up. “How’s that ear of yours feeling, son?” he asked Nick.
“To tell the truth, it’s starting to feel really hot,” Nick said. “I was almost thinking of asking if you could stop the car for a second so I could scoop up some snow to cool it down.”
Jack frowned. “That’s not a good sign at all,” he said. Then he turned to Kate. “You cleaned his ear up with antiseptic and surgical alcohol, right?”
“Of course,” she answered. “But I could only do that once we got back to the apartment since I lost my bag in the river. I did what I could, but I know it wasn’t nearly soon enough.”
“Nick,” Jack said, “if you’re feeling like your ear’s getting hotter, you’re probably developing an infection. I’m guessing you don’t have any antibiotics at home.”
Nick shook his head.
“The human mouth is full of very nasty bacteria, and if it gets into a wound, it can cause one hell of an infection. If you leave that untreated,” Jack said gravely, “it could prove fatal.”
Nick swallowed slowly, looking suddenly fearful. “What do I do? I mean, it’s not like I can see a doctor or go to the hospital now, can I?”
Jack shook his head. “Every hospital in the city is probably swamped right now with people who’ve been shot, and thousands of others who were wounded in the rocket attacks—and I don’t think they’ll be able to do much for the vast majority of these people, seeing that most of their equipment has been put out of commission permanently by the EMP strike. There is another way, though.”
“There is?” Nick asked.
“There is, yes,” Jack said. “We’ve got some general-purpose antibiotics with us, but my brother Arthur has a lot of specific medication stored in his cabin. Before he became, well, a hermit of sorts, he was actually on his way to becoming a surgeon. He’s a very intelligent man and knows a lot about medicine. He could help you if you come with us.”
Nick nodded slowly, considering his options. Eventually, he spoke. “I don’t want to be a burden,” he said, “and I don’t want you to think that you owe me anything for saving your wife’s life. I did that without any thought of a reward or thanks. It was just the right thing to do.”
Jack smiled. “And that’s exactly why I’d like to take you with us, Nick. Look, it’s up to you, but I think I speak for all of us when I say we’d love for you to stay with us. A
n extra pair of hands would be a great help where we’re going.”
Nick reached up and gingerly touched his ear. He winced from the stab of hot pain that ripped through his skull at the slightest touch. He knew what Jack was saying was correct, and without antibiotics, the infection that was brewing in his ear could well turn fatal. “Okay,” he said, “okay, I’ll stay with you guys. Thank you, Jack, thank you so much for helping me out like this.”
In the back of the Humvee, Susan let out a little squeal of delight, which she promptly suppressed, and her cheeks glowed with embarrassment. Delight, however, sparkled brightly in her eyes.
Before anyone else could say anything, though, the mood in the vehicle switched abruptly from hope to alarm, for up ahead, through the curtains of wind-borne snow, they saw headlights coming toward them in the darkness.
21
The first thing Jack did was turn off the Humvee’s headlamps. He then swerved off the street, drove across the sidewalk, and into the nearby house's front yard. He hoped that the approaching vehicle hadn’t seen his lights, but that was probably a futile hope since he had seen theirs.
“Who is that?” Kate asked, her tone betraying the urgency in her voice.
“If we’re lucky,” Jack answered, “they’re people like us, who were ready for something like this and are now doing what we’re doing and trying to get out of this place.”
“And if we’re not lucky, Dad?” Susan asked.
“Then those are the people who pulled the trigger on this whole disaster,” Jack said grimly. “Get your guns ready, people, and put in earplugs in case we have to fire from inside the Humvee. I’m praying it doesn’t come down to that. A firefight is our absolute last resort, but we need to be ready for a worst-case-scenario situation.”
Survive the Day Boxset: EMP Survival in a Powerless World Page 63