Begin Again: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure (End Days Book 4)

by E. E. Isherwood

  “Thanks for letting me come in.”

  “Of course. We’re all lucky the SHF team managed to get us out of Sydney before things got worse.”

  They even took credit for my warning.

  Before hearing any other bad news, she blurted, “We have to go faster.”

  Laughter tittered around the room.

  She went on, “I talked to my sister in Colorado. She’s the one who warned me the world was ending. When I told her it would take us weeks to cross the ocean, she had a fit. Captain, uh, sir, we have to go faster.”

  He put his hands on a piece of equipment that looked like a handle sticking out of a box. “We are already traveling at the maximum safe cruising speed. They told me this was an emergency, and I’ve treated it as such.”

  “Can’t you squeeze more out of the engines? They do it all the time in the movies.” There were no icebergs in the South Pacific, although she briefly thought of the creature they’d struck on the way out of Sydney. It had seemed as big as one.

  “Miss, we have enough fuel for thirty-four days at almost maximum speed. It should only take us about twenty to reach Los Angeles. From there, the SHF people have assured me passage to Colorado. I’m not going to do anything to risk that, okay?”

  Her soul flooded with disappointment. “Yeah, mate, I hear you.”

  I’m sorry, sis. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make it.

  Kiowa, CO

  Buck used the Jakes to reduce speed through the town of Kiowa. It was a typical one-stoplight town, but without the stoplight. The two-lane main street was about a mile long, with lots of trees and a few Victorian homes along the sides.

  Horses were tied up in front of a place resembling a saloon.

  “I think we’ve found my home,” Connie said with excitement.

  “You’d live in a place like this?” Buck lived on Staten Island, which was more or less a crowded, never-ending subdivision. Kiowa had as many people as one city block back home. “There isn’t much to do but watch the traffic go by.”

  “After this journey, that’s exactly what I want to do—find a home where the most important decision I have to make is where on the wraparound porch I’m going to sit and relax.”

  “These look like houses from my time,” Lydia said from the rear of the cabin.

  “Would you live in one?” Garth asked her.

  “Oh, certainly. These people are obviously rich, to live in such luxury.”

  Buck only saw them as drains on his underfunded pocketbook. There were so many windows on the fancy homes, he figured they’d need an air conditioner unit for each one. After spending time touring the Middle East, cool air was one luxury he didn’t know if he could live without. That was why he kept his cabin so cold.

  “If you fine people could live in a drafty old house like these, I’m in.”

  Connie laughed. “Are you saying you’d be willing to settle down? You’d put the truck in Park permanently?”

  He was certain she was joking about it, but he’d been thinking that very thing almost since the first blast of blue energy went overhead. He’d desperately wanted to get back to Garth and have things return to normal, but his son was with him now, and opportunity beckoned him to do more than return to how things were. He wanted to spend real time with him. It was easy to see Garth and Big Mac running around in the grassy green yards of the big houses they were passing.

  And if Connie was there, so much the better.

  Lydia can live next door.

  Buck’s Peterbilt rolled through the town in about two minutes. His fantasy ended when six motorcycles roared passed and got in front of him.

  Connie tensed.

  “Be ready,” he said, worried.

  Twenty-Three

  Kiowa, CO

  “You know those guys?” Garth asked from the back.

  Connie seemed so surprised to see the bikers, he almost believed they were the same ones they’d tangled with in California. However, they were dressed in black leather and jeans without any of the gang patches worn by the Trash Pandas.

  “No,” Buck said with relief. “They’re normal bikers.”

  “Thank God.” Connie looked back at Garth. “Your father and I met when he rescued me from some motorcycle badasses like them.”

  “Nah, they weren’t badasses. They were just asses. They wouldn’t let me back up my truck ten feet. Can you believe that? If they’d given me ten feet, they’d still be alive.”

  “You killed them?” Garth seemed impressed.

  “Forget about it,” he groused. A second later, he realized he’d been abrupt. “Sorry. I’m about tapped out.”

  “Believe me, I understand.” Garth reached into the supplies piled at his feet. “Here, drink this.”

  “Mountain Dew?”

  “Tons of caffeine. It helped get me most of the way across Missouri.”

  “I love that drink!” Lydia stated in a bubbly voice.

  “Yeah, but you have to pace yourself. I gave her some, and she almost bounced out the car window, she was so hopped up on caffeine.”

  “Thanks, son. I’ll try not to bounce.” Connie opened it for him so he could keep his hands on the wheel.

  “It’s the least I can do,” Garth added.

  He and Connie watched the bikers drive off into the distance while Garth and Lydia talked quietly in the sleeper. Big Mac seemed to enjoy lying between the two kids, and he wasn’t about to suggest the dog move.

  A few minutes later, a huge military transport flew low and slow over Buck’s left shoulder. It was on the same path as them.

  “Gee, I wonder where they’re going?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Seems like the whole world is heading to SNAKE,” Connie answered.

  “I thought the planes were grounded?” Garth put forth from the back.

  “Nobody tells the military what to do,” Buck replied.

  They watched the four-propeller giant until the warped landscape blocked it from their view, much like the bikers.

  They made good time as they headed west. The terrain was relatively flat, with some hills and creek beds, so it was easy driving. However, when they started to see the foothills ahead, traffic started to stack up, and their pace dropped to match.

  Eve’s voice came from the CB. “Hey, Buck. Sparky says to turn on the radio. Big news.”

  Connie did the honors.

  A woman was already talking. “…and that is only the first step. You must stay inside the circle of the SNAKE supercollider when the power is cut. If you remain outside the circle, you risk being swept up by the overflow of dark energy from the severed link.”

  The voice paused.

  “Is she done?” Connie asked as the woman came back.

  “I don’t know if the government is able to assure your safety in the cities they say are safe. I hope they are telling the truth. However, you should know an Army unit came to Red Mesa, Colorado last night and took over. Their reason for coming here wasn’t to keep us safe or fix the collider. Instead, they came here because they believed this is the only place they can be safe from the impending disaster.”

  “I knew it!” Buck blurted out. “That military convoy was going to the supercollider. It wasn’t to take it over, though. It was to survive.”

  “Shh,” Connie replied.

  The radio voice carried on. “I’m sorry for the delay in doing this, but my technical capabilities are very limited while I’m trapped by the Army in here. However, the studio says they are calling two people who can verify everything I’m telling you.”

  A string of clicks and chimes rang out from the radio.

  “Hello?” a man asked as if he was part of a radio call-in show.

  A second man with a similar voice said, “Who is this?”

  “Hello, gentlemen. You both know me. I’m Doctor Faith Sinclair, head of Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes in Red Mesa, CO.”

  “How do you have a phone?” one of the men compl
ained with anger and surprise. “And who else is on the line? This is a security breach of the highest order.”

  The woman didn’t skip a beat. “I’ve linked you two together because it is important you both know what the other is doing. Doctor Kyle Johnson is on the line in Geneva, Switzerland. Say hello, please.”

  One of the men did so.

  “And also on the line, I have the current leader of the SNAKE supercollider. You took over the entire campus as a way to save us, didn’t you, Doctor Kyle Johnson? Why don’t you say hello too?”

  “What the hell is this?” angry Kyle responded.

  “This isn’t possible,” nice Kyle added, “but it does sound like me.”

  The woman spoke fast. “There are two Dr. Johnsons on the line, but they aren’t twins or brothers or even related. They are the same person. A failed experiment at CERN in Switzerland sent a carbon copy of the man over here to America.”

  Buck and Connie looked at each other as if they were listening to a science fiction program. It wasn’t possible to be two places at once.

  “This is crazy,” Buck said reverently.

  “I know,” she mouthed.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of America, please be aware Dr. Johnson could have gone anywhere in the world after he traveled the quantum bridge between Switzerland and Colorado. Anywhere. And yet he chose to come here. That’s because—”

  “Wait! Stop! Is this being broadcast?” Angry Kyle grew even more distraught. “How are you doing this, Faith? Someone, stop her!”

  The determined woman did not stop. “He’s mad because he knows SNAKE is the only place on this side of the world he can be safe when his people drop a nuclear bomb on Geneva, Switzerland. That’s how he plans to fix the world.”

  “No!”

  The woman chuckled. “Please, everyone listening to this. Get to Red Mesa, Colorado. I don’t know if it is going to be permanently safe or if the security will be temporary, but I swear to you on this radio program that you and your family will have a better chance than if—”

  Screams bleated from the radio, and the woman stopped talking. After more shouting, snaps of sound cracked out of the speakers.

  “Gunshots,” Buck deadpanned.

  “Holy shit,” Garth exclaimed. “This is intense.”

  A new voice came on the frequency. “We will try to rejoin Dr. Sinclair as soon as possible. In the meantime, we have an updated list of safe cities.”

  The radio broadcast was over.

  More traffic stacked up in front of them.

  “Welcome to Sedalia,” Connie relayed as they passed the sign.

  Red Mesa, CO

  Once Phil had Ethan’s support, he sprang to action with a plan. As he suggested, the three NORAD airmen were assigned to watch over the two captured guards, while the six enlisted and two officers from Task Force Blue 7 made their way out of the hills and down to the Hogback.

  They kept out of the way of the soldiers and wandered into an upscale subdivision with plenty of available vehicles to requisition. They decided to take four cars, two men per vehicle, leaving him with Corporal Grafton again. On a whim, he cut an American flag off a subdivision flag pole before they got on the road.

  “Where are we going?” Grafton asked as Phil drove the borrowed pickup truck down the narrow two-lane road. Based on his reconnaissance, the road would take them between two of the steep sections of Hogback and onto the flat plains.

  “I saw a town at the edge of the ring.” He wished he had his full battalion with him again. He hadn’t seen them since his injury and evac out of Afghanistan. There were so many people in danger that he needed more than one man to help him. “We’ll get all those people to come up this road. Damn, sure would have been nice to have your radio for this.”

  “Truth. The 130th guys could have brought people up here at any time, though. Why didn’t they?”

  He didn’t want to guess, but he couldn’t stop himself. It could have been intentional, or it could have been an oversight. Just as likely, it was some incompetent officer who had handed out the wrong marching orders. Phil could easily fix the error by going down there and making people go where he wanted.

  It took five minutes to get to the designated area of operations. As he thought, the tiny town of Sedalia was the boundary between the outline of the supercollider and the rest of the Colorado high plains. The canyon road went into town from the west, an intersecting two-lane highway that ran roughly north-south, forming a crude T-shape.

  “They are putting people outside the collider.” On the far side of the main highway, above the T, cars were being directed into a huge field by soldiers almost certainly from the 130th.

  There was nothing but empty fields on the near side of the highway, below the top of the T. To his left, several guards stood by a small concrete blockhouse, which was the familiar emergency exit portal he recognized from the woods. Another bunker was barely visible about two miles down the highway. The second one was also on the near side of the road, giving him visual confirmation of what he already suspected.

  “You see this T-shape? Everything in town and on this side of the highway is safe. Everything on the far side of the highway is in danger.” Phil pulled the pickup to the side of the road.

  A ten-foot-tall deer fence ran for miles along the highway. The only break in it was the few blocks of the rustic village. Many soldiers crowded the roads in the town, and they had dozens of Humvees clogging the streets and acting as roadblocks.

  No one was allowed through the town. Instead, they were directed to the growing parking area beyond the highway. It was still unclear how the order had gotten messed up, but he had a better sense of how to fix it now.

  “What do we do?”

  “Grafton, this might get you into major trouble. Possibly shot. I don’t know what those boys over there are going to do once we kick this off, so you don’t have to come with me if you don’t want.”

  Grafton motioned to the crowds. “My wife might be out there. She lives in Pueblo. If there’s any chance she is, I want to get her to safety. If not, and she’s waiting in some other line, I’d hope there would be someone willing to do the right thing. I’m down for whatever.”

  He put the truck into gear and turned right into the scrub-grass field next to the canyon road. The plan was to avoid the town of Sedalia in the middle of the action and go to the southern flank of the crowd. It would keep him as far from the soldiers as possible. Grafton held onto their rifles, but there was almost no point in having them since there were dozens of soldiers in the town and only two of them.

  The rest of Task Force Blue 7 was supposed to go to other parts of the collider ring, but after seeing the situation up close, Phil realized that all three groups should have converged on the town. That was where all the action was.

  When he was a mile from Sedalia, he turned and aimed the truck toward the fence.

  The hot, dusty two-lane roadway evoked memories of his mother for some reason. She had disappeared on a dusty Nevada highway, so it wasn’t unusual to think of her when the conditions were similar.

  Stay in the present, Phil.

  Almost no one on the packed highway seemed to notice him.

  He had an idea for how to change that.

  Sedalia, CO

  Garth leaned against Buck’s seat so he could see all the action outside. Cars and trucks scooted into the fields to the right, parking where they could.

  “This is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Buck replied. “Connie? Are we there already?”

  His dad’s friend flipped through the road atlas until she found the Colorado map. “No, definitely not. This is Sedalia, which is pretty far from Red Mesa. I don’t think we should stop here.”

  “The radio said we have to get into the area protected by the SNAKE collider. I don’t see anything that looks remotely scientific out here.”

  Aside from a random concrete shack behind a deer fence, he hadn’t seen any trace of civ
ilization along the remote highway. There was a small town up ahead and the cars in the field, but not much else.

  The radio broadcaster stopped reading the names of cities and spoke directly to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, we regret we couldn’t continue with Dr. Sinclair’s live broadcast from inside the SNAKE facility, but we can confirm the part of what she said was true. Shortwave radio tells of a nuclear strike in the mountains of Switzerland. We have no other details at this time, but we believe it corroborates her story.”

  Buck exhaled loudly.

  Garth shared his anxiety. “Are we safe here?”

  They were stuck in a huge traffic jam, but lots of cars were turned into the grass on the right side of the road, getting into any open space they could, and following what everyone else was doing.

  “This isn’t Red Mesa, Buck,” Connie drawled.

  He mumbled the F-word under his breath. “There is something wrong here, but I can’t figure it out.”

  Connie pointed to the west. “We want to be in those hills.”

  “Then let’s go,” Garth encouraged everyone. “We don’t have to do what everyone else is doing.”

  Buck looked all around, then raised the CB microphone. “This is Buck. We’re figuring out where to go next—"

  Lydia pointed across his face, out Buck’s window. “What’s that man doing?”

  A soldier had crashed his sand-colored truck through the long, wire fence. While they watched, he jumped out of his rig, grabbed an American flag, and started waving it like one of those guys who swing around big plastic arrows to announce new stores at the mall.

  “Dad, look at him!” He tapped the side window so his dad knew where to look.

  He stopped talking on the CB and briefly looked at Connie. Her taut smile made up his mind.

  “Hold on, guys,” he said to his cab mates. “I don’t know what this is about, but I’d rather take my chances on the side of the highway closest to the mountains than follow all these people to the wrong parking lot.”