“I’m a veteran,” Bill said gruffly. “I served in Vietnam. Drive-up the barrier. I’ll talk to ‘em.”
Mary didn’t think that the army would care that Bill was a veteran, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do at this point. She couldn’t turn around and go back through the city; she’d only just made it out alive. It would be a crushing blow if the army refused to let her through the checkpoint, and even worse if they tried to confiscate the vehicle. However, even if these things happened, she thought, they could find a way to cross the river farther downstream and continue on foot. Anything would be better than going back into the city, especially now that it was late in the afternoon, and twilight would be falling soon. Whatever happened here, Mary was determined to escape the city before dark by any means necessary.
“All right, everyone, just stay calm,” Mary said. “And for now, put your guns away. We don’t wanna cause any unnecessary tensions with these guys.”
“I’ll talk to ‘em,” Bill said determinedly, “they’ll listen to me.”
With her heart in her mouth, Mary drove slowly up to the checkpoint. When she got within twenty yards of the gate, an officer walked out, holding his hand up and signaling to her to stop. Seven or eight privates ran out, flanking the car on both sides and aiming their assault rifles at the occupants. Mary noticed a strange wildness in the soldiers’ eyes; they seemed to be staring at the rumbling car with an unsettling mixture of fear, awe, envy, and aggression in their eyes. Suddenly, she felt as if driving up to the barrier had been a terrible idea.
The officer, a sturdily built middle-aged man with close-cropped blond hair, had a pistol in his hand, but unlike his troops, he kept it aimed at the ground instead of pointing it at Mary and her party. He wore a thin smile on his strong-jawed face, and there was more than a hint of menace in his pale blue eyes.
“The road is closed, ma’am,” he said coolly. “And I’m going to need to see some paperwork for this vehicle.”
Bill saw from the insignia on the officer’s uniform that he was a lieutenant. “Listen here lieutenant,” he said, leaning forward over Mary’s shoulder to talk to the officer. “I’m a veteran, and I served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne. I took a commie bullet for this country at Dak To in ‘67, and got a Purple Heart—”
“I respect and thank you for your service, soldier,” the officer said coldly, cutting him off, “but I don’t care if you’re the president’s brother. If I don’t see some papers in the next few seconds, we’re gonna have a problem here. A serious problem.” He curled his finger around the trigger of the pistol.
“What paperwork do you need to see?” Mary asked, trying to stall for time, her mind racing as she tried to come up with a plan to get out of what was quickly becoming an increasingly dangerous situation.
“That question alone tells me you don’t have the documents you need, ma’am,” the officer said. “I’m going to have to ask you all to step out of the vehicle, nice and slow, keeping your hands where we can see them.”
“No, no, I have some papers with me,” Mary said, desperately trying to play cool, “and I’m on government business, but you, sir, you haven’t shown me any credentials or—”
“I’m not going to say this again,” the officer growled, whipping his pistol up and aiming it at Mary’s face. “Get out of the car. Now.”
“You asshole,” Bill snarled. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’re no better than the thugs who tried to carjack us back in the city! Where’s your commanding officer? I wanna speak to the commanding officer here!”
“I am the commanding officer!” the lieutenant roared, any pretense of civility now flung out the window, “and if you goddamn civilians don’t get out of this car right now, I swear to God, I will order my men to open fire! This is the last time I’m saying it! Get the fuck out of the car, or we will open fire! Do it now! No more talk, get the fuck out!”
Mary took her hands off the wheel, keeping them where the lieutenant could see them, and sighed slowly, and sadly, the game was up. There was nothing she could do or say now to keep the car. They would have no choice but to continue on foot from this point onward.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Relax, we’re getting out.”
“Move it!” the lieutenant snapped. “No more—”
A tremendous flash of light temporarily blinded everyone in and around the car. It was accompanied by a deep, earth-shaking boom and a concussive force that ripped men’s bodies apart and blew out all the windows of the AMC and hurled the car over in a vicious, tumbling roll. Mary barely even had any time to register what had happened before everything faded into deep and silent darkness.
17
When Mary regained consciousness, she was overwhelmed for a few seconds by complete confusion and disorientation. For the most part, all she could hear was a shrill whine screaming monotonously in her ears, but beyond it, sounding terribly far away, was the sound of guns firing and men yelling. Thick, black smoke was billowing everywhere, and she could barely see a foot in front of her, much less breathe properly. Yet another factor that contributed to her intense disorientation was the fact that she was upside down.
It seemed that she was in some sort of terrifying nightmare, from which no sense of anything could be made. Then, however, the events of the previous few minutes came rushing back into her head. The army barricade. The soldiers surrounding the vehicle. The officer pointing his gun at her face and demanding they get out.
Then an almighty explosion. With this onset of mental clarity out of the fog of confusion, Mary’s thoughts immediately went to her daughter. “Ann!” she gasped, coughing and scrambling frantically in the smoke-choked gloom, trying to extricate herself from the seatbelt that was keeping her strapped upside-down to the driver’s seat. “Ann, talk to me, are you okay, where are you?!”
“Help, Aunt Mary, help,” a strangled voice called out through the smoke, somewhere behind her.
“James!” she cried. “Where’s Ann, is she okay? Ann!”
“I can’t move. I’m trapped under the old guy. I think he’s … he’s…”
“Mom!”
“Ann!”
“I’m hurt, Mom, but I’ll be okay. I think.”
“Where are you?” Mary had a knife on her, and she fumbled around, trying to get it out so she could cut the seatbelt and escape.
Outside, men were yelling and shooting, and the sound of thunderous explosions was vibrating the bridge.
Just then, two familiar shoes and legs appeared next to Mary, outside the car. One leg was drenched with blood, and Ann was clearly limping. She had been flung out of the car when it had rolled, it seemed.
“Aunt Mary, please help, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” James gasped from somewhere behind Mary.
“Hold on, James,” Mary said, finally getting a grip on her knife. She pulled it out and began sawing frantically through the seatbelt.
Ann, meanwhile, got down onto her hands and knees, grimacing with pain and feeling woozy but doing what she could to help. She peered into the car, which was lying on its roof after having been flipped over multiple times by the force of the explosion. James was lying on the ceiling and was pinned down under Bill’s limp, bloody body. Bill was neither moving nor breathing, and Ann was sure the old man had been killed.
James saw Ann peering in through the shattered window. “Ann,” he croaked, struggling futilely under the dead weight of Bill’s body. “Help, I … can’t … breathe…”
Ann reached in and grabbed Bill’s shirt, pulling at his body and doing her best to get him off of James. She couldn’t move him; however, he was simply too heavy.
“James, hold on!” she yelled. “I’ve gotta get my mom out first!”
“Hurry, please,” James gasped.
With pain blasting through her right leg, Ann crawled over to the driver’s door. Mary had almost finished sawing through her seatbelt, and when she did, she slid out of the seat, her shoulders pressed again
st the crumpled roof of the car, and then with Ann’s help, she managed to crawl out.
“Quick, Mom, James is stuck!” Ann said. She and Mary grabbed Bill’s body and managed to haul it off of James, who sucked in a great gulp of smoky air and immediately started coughing.
A spray of bullets peppered the car, and Ann and Mary both hit the ground, covering their heads. “We have to get out of here,” Mary gasped. “James, can you move?”
“I’m, ugh … okay now … I think,” he spluttered, coughing.
“Bill, Bill, can you hear me?” Mary asked. Grunting and groaning with effort, she managed to turn Bill’s body over, and when she did, a blade of grief stabbed through her core when she saw his lifeless eyes staring blankly at her. “Oh my God, Bill,” she whispered sadly.
Another burst of bullets hammered the car, spurring further urgency into Mary. Somewhere close by, a soldier returned fire at the unknown enemies. She knew that they had to get out of here, and she knew that they wouldn’t be going any farther in the AMC. “Come on, Ann, help me get James out!” she said.
The two of them managed to drag James through the shattered rear window. He was bruised and covered in cuts, but none of his wounds were serious. “Goodbye, Bill,” Mary whispered to Bill’s corpse, and then she grabbed the backpacks from the smashed-up car and led the two teens through the choking clouds of black smoke toward the military barricade. She had seen a massive cut across Ann’s thigh, and another smaller, but equally deep, wound across her calf but knew that getting out of this battle zone alive was her first priority, before attempting to take care of her daughter’s injury.
“Let’s go!” she said. “Move fast and keep your heads down!”
The bridge was covered with rubble, corpses, and the grisly remains of soldiers who had been blown to pieces by the rocket, or whatever it was that the terrorists had fired at the barricade. Because of all the smoke, the three of them could barely see a few yards ahead of them at any time, but Mary kept to the far right, seeing as the sounds of soldiers shooting were coming mostly from the center and left of the bridge.
She came across the lieutenant’s corpse and bent down to hastily search his pockets. A tiny surge of triumph ripped through her when her fingers curled around a set of car keys. Whether it was for one of the Humvees or one of the Jeeps didn’t matter; as long as she was able to get into one of the vehicles and hightail it out of here, that was all that mattered.
“Come on, quickly!” she urged when she got to the concrete barrier.
The concrete blocks the army had set up to create the barrier were only around four feet tall, so they were easy enough to climb over. Because the remaining soldiers had their hands full with the terrorists, and because of the impenetrable denseness of the clouds of black smoke choking the bridge, none of the soldiers could see Mary and the teenagers scaling the barrier.
They ran over to the nearest Jeep, and Mary tried the keys in the ignition, but they didn’t fit. “Dammit,” she muttered, running over to the next vehicle, one of the Humvees. Just as she reached it, another rocket came streaking in from the city, smashing into the barrier on the far side of the bridge with a horrendous force and a deafening, blinding explosion of light and sound. Even though they were at least twenty or thirty yards away, the force of it knocked James and Ann over and flung chunks of debris out everywhere, hurling broken chunks of concrete and twisted shards of metal out in all directions. A hail of debris came down over the next few seconds, and the three of them could do little but curl up on the ground and keep their heads covered while their hearts thumped with fear and a shrill, incessant whine screeched in their ears.
“Everyone okay?” Mary asked once the initial shock of the explosion had passed.
“I’m okay,” James said, struggling to his feet.
“Yeah, I’m okay, too,” Anna gasped, but Mary could hear her daughter sounded weaker. Ann was losing a lot of blood from the wound on her leg, and they needed urgent attention, but Mary had to get them all out of the battle zone first.
“Let’s try this one,” Mary said, running over to the nearest Humvee. She jumped into the driver’s seat, slid the key into the ignition, and this time it fit. She turned the key, and the motor roared to life. “Get in, hurry!”
Ann and James piled into the back, and Mary slammed the door shut and put the Humvee in gear.
“Hey!” One of the soldiers had noticed what was going on, and he raised his assault rifle and started shooting, but the vehicle was bulletproof.
Mary floored the accelerator and raced away, with bullets hammering the back and side of the Humvee as she sped out of the combat zone. She blasted out of the clouds of smoke, and saw, with intense relief, that there were no more soldiers or roadblocks ahead. There were plenty of abandoned vehicles blocking the bridge, but it was easy enough to get around them. Soon Mary had crossed the bridge and got onto the freeway leading to the mountain towns. There were a lot of dead cars all over the highway, too, but there was plenty of room to drive on the shoulder of the road. Mary, worried that the soldiers might pursue her, raced along the shoulder of the road at high speed. Even though she knew she had to check out Ann’s wounds as soon as she could, Mary couldn’t afford to stop, not until she was sure she was safe from the soldiers.
After a few minutes of driving, she came to the offramp that would take her to the area of the mountains she was headed. She glanced in her rear-view mirror just to make sure nobody was coming after her, then headed down the offramp, pulled off the road and got out, leaving the motor running.
“Ann, how’s your leg?” Mary asked.
“It hurts pretty bad,” Ann said, grimacing. She’d been able to put on a brave face up until now and had sat stoically in the back without crying, but now that the adrenalin was wearing off, the pain was becoming much more noticeable. Ann had also lost quite a lot of blood and was feeling woozy.
Now that the air was no longer thick was black smoke and Mary was able to get a close look at her daughter’s leg, the cause of the wounds was obvious to see; twisted shards of metal, most likely from the AMC’s door, were stuck in Ann’s leg. The wounds were bleeding quite extensively, but Mary knew that the bleeding could become lethal if she pulled the shrapnel out of the muscle. She had first aid training, but this, unfortunately, was beyond her ability to deal with. All she could do for the moment was tie a tourniquet around Ann’s leg to slow the bleeding somewhat.
“There are some like, army rations and stuff in the back here,” James said, trying to be helpful while Mary was tying a tourniquet with a towel she’d found in the Humvee.
“Are there any energy bars, glucose gel, anything like that?” Mary asked.
James rummaged through the box. “Yeah, plenty of that sorta stuff.”
“Ann, sweetie,” Mary said, “have a few energy bars and some of those packets of glucose gel. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you need to get your energy levels back up.”
She and James had some too; they were also feeling weary and drained, after everything they’d been through. Mary was doing her best to stay determined and positive but seeing the full extent of the wounds on her daughter’s leg had struck her like a sledgehammer blow to the skull. The tourniquet had slowed the bleeding a lot, but blood was still oozing from the wound, and if the twisted metal wasn’t extracted from the wound soon, it would become septic and possibly deadly. She didn’t know what she was going to do now. Mary needed to find a doctor to remove the shrapnel, but where would she find anyone who could help?
Of course, if the place she intended to go was the same as it had been all those years ago, there could well be someone there who was capable of helping Ann. However, there was no way of knowing whether that was the case or not, and if that gamble failed, they would be stuck in the middle of nowhere with nobody to help Ann at all. The other option would be to drive to one of the county hospitals, but would any equipment in these hospitals even function? They would also likely be swamped with thousands of in
jured people from the day’s chaos.
Mary checked the gas gauge of the Humvee. There was just enough gas in the tank to get her to one of these destinations, either the mountains or a hospital, but after reaching whatever destination she chose, they would likely be stranded.
“Where are we going to from here, Aunt Mary?” James asked.
The sun was setting, and the shadows were growing darker, and without any of the artificial lighting that usually flooded the city and everywhere around it, the coming night would be darker than any in living memory. Mary knew that she couldn’t linger here any longer; she needed to get far away from people, for it would be the two-legged animals who would be the most dangerous creatures skulking through the shadows of the coming night.
“We’re going into the mountains,” Mary said. She had made her choice, and she desperately hoped that this wasn’t a mistake that she would have to pay for with her daughter’s life.
18
After driving for around half an hour, everyone had the chance to wind down from the madness they had just escaped from. Mary made good progress, driving at high speed along the shoulder of the freeway, where there was a clear and open path, unobstructed by abandoned cars. But when they got off the highway and began to enter mountain territory, the roads started clearing up, with fewer stopped vehicles blocking their path.
The last of the day’s light was shining on the city in the distance behind them, and the sight they saw was a surreal and nightmarish one. Huge fires burned through the town, and the horizon was black with smoke. They were too far away to hear any explosions or gunfire, but they could see bright flashes lighting up the gloom all over the city. The black-clad terrorists and the US Army were still fighting fiercely in the streets, it seemed. Everyone in the vehicle was thankful that they had escaped the madness. It would surely be hell on earth in the city throughout the coming night.
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 21 | The Darkest Day Page 11