Stronghold | Book 1 | Minute Zero

by Jayne, Chris

  Roger snorted. “I haven’t a clue.” He through his hands up in the air. “Enough bullshit. We gotta figure out what to do. If the cars don’t run, Deke, I have to get to Louise. She’s seven months pregnant.”

  Deacon, with one last sad glance at the coffee maker, slipped his 6 foot four inch frame into the kitchen chair and let his military training come to the fore. “Agreed, but first things first. The worst thing we can do is start running around like idiots with no plan. Whatever is going to happen, it’s not going to happen in the next hour. Even when things start to fall apart, they don’t fall apart this fast. Most people are still sitting there waiting for the power to come back on and clueless about why their cars aren’t working. Even if they know their cars aren’t working - and a lot of people sitting in their houses don’t realize that yet. So, let’s figure out what we have, and what we know in order of importance.”

  “Okay,” Roger agreed, drawing up another chair.

  “First, somehow we have to get information. This obviously is not a power outage, given the fact that,” he enumerated on his fingers, “your truck won’t start, the hard line phone is dead, and my cell phone is dead.”

  “Could this be local somehow?”

  “You mean, just your house?” Deacon tried to clarify Roger’s question. He shook his head in the negative. “If this is an EMP - an electro-magnetic pulse - it doesn’t work like that.” He tried to recall things he’d been told. “I do know there was an event in the eighteen-hundreds where an astronomer noticed a lot of sunspot activity, and simultaneously telegraph lines all of the United States stopped working. Some even melted. So no, there’s nothing that would cause an EMP over just your house.”

  “No, I didn’t mean just the house. Obviously, we’re both pretty sure we saw a plane fall out of the sky. But let’s say, just central Montana?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know for sure, but to my eye, that was a commercial jet and they fly five, six miles up. Anything powerful enough to knock a plane down and, at the same time, fry my phone in my pocket has to be widespread.” Then, in spite of himself, Deacon found himself doubting his own perceptions. “You’re sure you’ve never seen a plane go that way before?”

  “No,” Roger insisted. “That was a big plane. There’s a small airport in Lewiston, the kind where guys land their Cessnas, but, as far as I know there’s nothing closer than Bozeman that can handle a commercial jet. Plus Lewiston is the other direction. Over that mountain there’s nothing but… more mountains.”

  “So let’s assume it’s widespread. But what does that mean? Denver? L.A? Washington D.C.? I have no idea, but it’s a lot farther than Lewiston. And if that’s true, then we have to assume that we also have another two women and two children a hundred and thirty miles away who are sitting at a rest stop with a car that doesn’t work and no idea what is going on.”

  “And, if Lori is to be believed, some seriously bad people chasing her,” Roger added.

  “Right, but…” Deacon tapped his finger on the table, “…at least we caught a break there. They are now ahead of her and they don’t know where she is. Plus, they also have a car that almost certainly doesn’t work either. So that may buy us a little time there.”

  “Can we be sure of that?”

  “Of what?” asked Deacon.

  “That their cars don’t work.”

  He dug his phone out of his pocket and held it out to Roger one more time. “If whatever happened is powerful enough to kill this, I can guarantee that any vehicle with any sort of electronics stopped cold. If they flew in, and rented a car, it’s at most one year old. So no, it stopped running with everyone else’s.” Deacon thought for a long second. “We’ve got to get information, and there’s no way to solve that sitting here. No one’s going to drive up the driveway and tell us what’s going on. It could be that old CB radios might still work, if they could be powered somehow, but I’m assuming you don’t have one.”

  Roger shook his head, no. “We’ve got to get to Lou, Deacon. That’s the most important thing. Lou… then Lori. If it was five miles, she’d probably just try to walk it. But it’s more than twenty and she’s seven months pregnant. And even if Lou and Sandy could walk twenty miles, they can’t do it with a nine-year-old with a broken arm.”

  Deacon agreed. He’d traveled twenty miles on foot on many occasions in his career. He knew exactly how far it was, and even for trained operators it got pretty brutal towards the end. They’d carried Marie to the car wrapped in a woman’s sweatshirt, probably Louise’s, Deacon assumed, meaning Louise had a sweatshirt and the child probably had no coat at all. For two women, one pregnant, with an injured child, without proper gear or any supplies to try to walk twenty miles… He didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Roger, those two objectives are really the same. To get information and to get Louise - and Lori - we need to get out of here. And that means we need transportation.” He hesitated. “How fast does that tractor go?”

  “That piece of shit?” Roger’s voice went high. “Maybe ten miles an hour on a good day.” He shook his head. “No that’s the last resort. It breaks down on me once a week when I am driving it out to the fields, and the only reason I can fix it is that I am sitting here with tools. Out on the road, we’d been dead ducks. No way we could take it into Lewiston.”

  Outside the small house, suddenly the sound of children’s voices were heard, softly then louder. Then a group of four children, red-cheeked from running in the cool fall air, tumbled into the kitchen. “They’re hungry, Mr. Roger,” said Beth.

  “And cold, Daddy,” added Tony.

  Roger’s face fell, and Deacon didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that his brother had temporarily completely forgotten that, on top of everything else, they were responsible for four children who were too young to stay home by themselves. “What do we do with them while you and I are trying to sort this all out?” Suddenly a look of relief swept over his face and he answered his own question. “I think I have an idea. When we went to Bowenville the other day, we left the kids with the neighbors, the Timmers. And guess what?” He snapped his fingers triumphantly. “Bob Timmer has an old pickup. Really old. Like a ’68 or ’70 Ford. I saw it in his garage and asked him about it. Do you think that will still run?” he asked hopefully. “What I know about classic cars isn't much.”

  “It should,” Deacon answered. “Pick-up that old definitely still has a carburetor.” More and more information was coming back to Deacon now that the first shock was over. Electronic fuel injection, which had replaced carburetors in the 1980s, if Deacon was remembering correctly, was the primary component of modern car engines that would be vulnerable to an EMP.

  Roger looked at the kids, then back at Deacon. “I’d say you should go up there, but Bob doesn’t know you. So you stay with the kids, and I’ll go on the tractor. It’s slow but it’s faster than walking. Pray it makes it two miles without breaking down, pray they’re home, and pray that his pick-up runs.”

  “That’s a lot of prayin’.”

  “I hate to say it, but right now that might be our best bet.”

  “No, brother.” Deacon pushed back from the kitchen table and reached to the top of the kitchen cabinets. “These are our best bet.”

  When they had arrived home from their trip to Bowenville the previous Wednesday, Roger had taken the two handguns that he and Deacon had carried and stuck them both on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. Louise hadn’t liked it; she’d wanted the firearms unloaded and put back into the gun safe, but Roger had made it clear that, while he didn’t believe anyone from Bowenville was going to come down the driveway looking for Sandy, he wasn’t taking any chances. And that, Deacon realized, was before anyone had even known about what was going on with Lori.

  “No,” Deacon repeated. “You pray all you want, but we both carry these all the time. Beginning now. If everything turns back on ten minutes from now, in a week we’ll be sitting around drinking our beers laughing a
t how we thought the world had ended with an EMP.” He shook his head. “God, I hope so. But if not, starting right now, the people who are ready and smart are the people that are going to live.”

  Deacon saw that Beth Kaplan was watching them wide-eyed, watching and listening, staring back and forth between the men’s faces and the guns. He’d had enough experience with young enlisted men who weren’t that much older than Beth to know that lying to people and trying to hide things only made it worse. He tucked the Sig into the waistband of his pants and sat back down. “Beth, it’s Beth right?” She nodded. “I don’t want you to be scared, but some things are going on that Roger… Mr. Roger,” he corrected, remembering that was how all the children addressed adults, “and I don’t understand.”

  “Is it my mom? Did Marie die?”

  “No,” Deacon said with absolute firmness. “It’s got absolutely nothing to do with your family. We think something might have happened up in the sky that makes the cars not work. So right now we’re trying to figure out how to get to Lewiston, where your mom and your sister and Miss Louise are. To bring them home. We need you to be a grown up now.” The girl’s eyes went very wide at this statement. “You might have to go stay at someone else’s house, someone you don’t know. You’re going to have to play with the little ones and watch them.”

  Roger piped in. “Help Hannah go to the bathroom.” He turned to Tony and Frankie Kaplan. “Are you two listening to this? Uncle Deke and I are going to have to go to Lewiston to get Mommy and Frankie’s mom and Marie. Their car doesn’t work. And until we get back, you need to listen to Beth and mind her.”

  Two six-year-old boys were always an unknown variable but today, a combination of Roger’s serious tone and the fact that both had been shaken up by Marie’s broken arm seemed to have sobered them up, at least temporarily. Both nodded yes with no argument.

  Roger shrugged into his work jacket, which hung in a small alcove by the back door and grabbed a pair of gloves from a shelf. “While I’m gone, Beth, pack up a few things for everyone to do. Small things like coloring books. I don’t know if Mrs. Timmer has any toys up there.” He looked at Deacon. “Make sure they eat something.” He stepped out the door, muttering to himself. “Let’s just hope this works.”

  Deacon knew he wasn’t referring to just the tractor. As he turned back to look at the four children who still stood waiting expectantly in the kitchen, his eye caught on an old-fashioned clock hanging on the wall. He realized the second hand was moving, ticking with a jerk each second. What the heck? Reaching up he lifted it down from where it hung over the sink. A quick glance at the back showed that it was running off of two AA batteries.

  As Deacon hung it back up, he took in the time. 11:50 He couldn’t remember exactly what time Lori had called but thought it had been around 11. Not even an hour.

  How was that even possible?

  About the Author

  Could it happen? Would you survive?

  Chris Jayne is author of the apocalyptic EMP series “Stronghold.”

  Jayne is also the penname of a USA Today bestselling romance and thriller author who is has started asking “what if?” What if the lights go off? What if the food supply chain just… stops? The world could become an unfriendly place in a hurry.

  Three years ago, Chris began exploring the “prepper” lifestyle, and hopes that if TEOTWAWKI would actually happen, she would be in a position to protect her family and loved ones.

  She now spends her days splitting her time between her romance writing and her apocalyptic and dystopian fiction novels. Because what's more fun than imagining the end of the world from the comfort of your couch? And if the end of the world has a few sexy Navy Seals in it? All the better!

  She loves writing stories exploring how ordinary people cope with extraordinary circumstances, especially situations where the normal comforts, conveniences, and rules are stripped away.

  Check out her website: www.chrisjayne.com

  Follow her on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/authorchrisjayne, or Instagram: https://instagram.com/authorchrisjayne.

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  Don’t miss these exciting titles by Chris Jayne and Inferis Press!

  Stronghold Series

  Minute Zero, Book 1

  Day Zero, Book 2