Fallen Earth | Book 1 | Remnants

by Morrow, Jason D.

  She can protect herself.

  He’d taught her well. Leland had taught all his kids everything he knew about guns and how to shoot and defend themselves if they had to. He didn’t hunt often, but that didn’t keep him from taking them deer hunting a few times just so they knew how to do it. It was a basic survival skill. Personally, he didn’t care for hunting, mostly because he was impatient and didn’t like waiting for game to appear. He sure enjoyed the meat, though. Summer sausage. Stew. Steaks. Sometimes it was worth the torture of sitting in a deer stand for hours just to reap the benefits. Of course, in his line of work, he frequented the diners and other places hunters liked to congregate before their big outings and offered to pay them for some meat. They were more than happy to give him a part of anything they shot. His freezer was full. He wondered if that would have been the case if he didn’t wear a badge. Probably not.

  He remained a few steps behind Henry with the shotgun in his hands. His head pounded from their altercation, the pain getting worse as his adrenaline dwindled away. He was also getting tired. He was cold without his coat, and he wanted nothing more than to be back in bed.

  “How far are we?” Henry asked, echoing Leland’s thoughts.

  “A mile or so,” Leland said. “Would be a lot closer if you hadn’t run off.”

  Henry let the statement stand, and Leland almost wished he hadn’t said it. There was no point in beating up the boy more than he already was. He’d been right. Parole probably wasn’t an option for him anymore. At least, not for a long, long time.

  Leland had to remind himself that he didn’t know anything about Henry—that he could be a horrible person who deserved every bit of what was coming to him, probably worse.

  It was hard for him to believe it, though. People were more complicated than that. He had met a few that deserved everything the law could throw at them, but they were exceptions. And he rarely saw it in someone so young. Their mistakes were often just that—mistakes. Something they could have avoided if they had just sat and thought about the consequences of their actions a little more.

  Leland had read somewhere once that the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that helps you make decisions based on the possible consequences of your actions—wasn’t fully developed until the age of twenty-five. Reading that had given him some perspective, and it certainly made him think about Travis.

  Leland tried hard not to think about Travis. Every time he did, his throat would get tight and he would have to leave whatever room he was in.

  If he would have just looked past his situation. If he would have just…If I would have just…

  Leland shook his head.

  “At least it’s a nice night,” Leland said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “A little cold, I guess.”

  Henry glared back at him. “Are you really trying to make small talk?”

  I’m trying to put my mind elsewhere.

  Leland shrugged. “It’s a long trip.”

  “Yeah, maybe you should just let me go,” Henry said. “You could probably get home a lot faster if we didn’t go to the prison.”

  “And where would you go?”

  “Obviously I can’t tell you that. You would rat me out.”

  Leland raised an eyebrow and nodded. “I suppose I would. I guess I would just point to the bruises on my face and say you got away, then trekked off to—didn’t you say you had family in Chicago?”

  “That would be the first place they would look,” Henry said.

  “Chicago is a big place.”

  “With a lot of cops.”

  “Yeah, you probably wouldn’t go there.” Leland breathed deeply through his nose and looked up at the moon. It was dipping in the sky, and he wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he had picked up Henry. There was a part of him that was ready to give up his duty and actually let Henry go. He didn’t know what it was, but something gnawed at him, telling him the whole situation was all wrong. Still, with only a mile to go, he could be rid of Henry with his duty fulfilled. He thought about taking the next couple of days off. Part of Leland would be glad to be done with this whole situation, but the other part of him would feel guilty.

  Guilty for doing his job.

  “You know if you take me back to the prison, I’m a dead man,” Henry said.

  “No death penalty in Wisconsin,” Leland said. “Besides, no American prison kills people for escaping. They will just make sure you can’t do it again. You might find yourself in solitary for a while.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “And the moment I get out of solitary, I’m a dead man. I don’t mean by the system. I mean by a few of the prisoners I screwed over to get here.”

  “Oh,” Leland said. “What happened?”

  Henry turned for a moment and started to say something then closed his mouth. “You know,” he finally said, “you never read me my rights.”

  “What?”

  “When you arrested me. You didn’t read me my rights.”

  “So, whatever you say can’t be used against you in the court of law?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I have no interest in testifying against you,” Leland said. “As far as I’m concerned, you and I walked to the prison and you didn’t say a word to me the whole time.”

  “Not that it matters anyway.” Henry shrugged. “I’m still a dead man.”

  For a moment, Leland wondered if Henry was messing with him again—trying to get into his head somehow—but there seemed to be something true about what he was saying. He was sincere.

  “The escape was never my idea,” Henry said. “I didn’t plan out anything elaborate. I didn’t do any of the prep work. All I had was a friend who could make a high-quality 3D print of a key.”

  “A key?”

  “Yeah. You know what’s funny? The master key of the prison was the one used on the logo for the handbook all prisoners receive when they first enter the prison.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Leland said.

  “It’s an exact replica,” Henry said. “Someone in the prison knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew me, and they knew I had a friend who could make the copy. The plan originated with a man named Kevin Blake. Well, since I was the one with the key, and Blake needed me to get it for him, I decided to take matters into my own hands and slip out.”

  “How do you just slip out of a prison?” Leland said. “I’ve toured the place. You have to go past guard towers, several security levels. I don’t get it.”

  Henry laughed. “That’s the funny part. That key got me into places you would think I would’ve avoided. Guard break rooms. Back doors. Staff parking. Then, through the parking security gate. It was simply a matter of timing it right with the shifts. That’s something you study when you’re in there, especially with a long sentence. Guards talk like they try to switch things up, but no matter what they do, they continuously fall into the same routines. Once you know the routines, the patterns, you know how to weave in and out without being seen. The only part you can’t know is how the cameras are going to see you. But there are so many cameras, you know the guards aren’t looking at all of them at all times. Again, it’s about timing and making a bet. My bet paid off.”

  “Well, sort of. You’re with me, after all.”

  Henry sighed. “About that. You send me back to prison, Blake is going to kill me. It’s not a question of if. It’s when.”

  Leland wanted to say it wasn’t his problem, and he might have to anyone else, but the fear in this kid was real. There was no lie, no cover-up. He was genuinely afraid of dying as though he still had something to live for.

  Leland didn’t say anything to him, finding it easier if he just remained in his own thoughts, even if they did conjure up images of his son and his wife.

  They came to another bend in the road, and Leland recognized the turnoff to their right. Friendship Road. He had ignored a call out to Friendship Road earlier in the night. It was at Jeremiah Hoskins’ house
. He wondered if the old man was all right. He was in poor health, and the last time he’d had an ambulance come out to his home, he’d nearly died.

  The house was less than a quarter-mile deviation, so Leland told Henry what he was doing, and the fugitive offered no resistance. The further away from the prison, the better, he probably thought.

  Not long after they turned, Leland could see the ambulance, its reflective stickers glowing in the moonlight. Two EMTs sat outside the ambulance, one of them smoking a cigarette and pacing, the other sitting against the back tire. When they noticed Leland and the prisoner approaching, the man on the ground stood up and the smoker flicked away his cigarette. They seemed excited to see him until they noticed Henry in cuffs.

  The smoker looked at Leland’s badge and breathed a sigh of relief. “We sure are glad to see you. We’ve been out here for hours.”

  “Ambulance dead?” Leland asked.

  The smoker nodded.

  “What about Jeremiah?”

  The EMTs looked at each other. “Dead.”

  Leland looked at the ground and shook his head. He swore but he didn’t think anyone else heard it.

  “We did what we could, but he needed a hospital,” the other man said. “Radios. Cell phones. Everything…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Leland said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but it feels like something out of the Twilight Zone.”

  He glanced into the back of the EMT and saw the body covered in a white sheet.

  Senseless. Just senseless.

  “Any idea what’s happening?” the smoker asked.

  “Mr. Henry here thinks it was an EMP or something he read about in a novel one time,” Leland said, looking away from the body. “Said if Chicago was targeted, it could very well affect us too.”

  “Like a nuke?” the smoker said.

  Leland shrugged and looked at Henry. “Is that how that works?”

  “I mean, it could be anything,” Henry said. “A nuke. Multiple nukes. A big solar flare, who knows?”

  “And what would have happened in the prison if this is what you say it is?” Leland asked. “I’m guessing generators won’t be working.”

  “Let’s just say I picked a lousy day to try and break out,” he said.

  “What do you mean by that?” the smoker asked.

  “I mean, I probably would have gotten out anyway. If the power is out and the generators aren’t working”—he shook his head—“ it’s going to be an all-out war in there.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gwen woke with a start.

  She had been dreaming about her brother and mom.

  Nightmare. Not a dream.

  They were telling her about how her dad had come to be with them. That he was walking the celestial plane side-by-side with them.

  In this nightmare, the dead wore the scars of what killed them. For her mom, it was the flat chest and withering frame that remained. For her brother, a gunshot wound in the head. For dad…a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

  She felt sick.

  When she was a little girl, she had always been afraid for her dad whenever he would go to work. She had heard stories. She had watched the shows. A cop’s life was always dangerous. Always a step away from being murdered. Cora had always tried to calm her and tell her that he was safe, but it never did any good.

  It had gotten better when Gwen got older, but then the nightmares came again after her brother, Travis, died. The nightmares got even worse six months ago after her mother died. It was usually the same dream, though her dad’s wounds would sometimes change. One night it might be a gunshot wound to the head, another it might be his chest. Or maybe it was a stab wound or massive blunt force trauma all over his body. Despite her dad’s variance in appearance, the nightmare was always the same. Her withered mother, her shot brother, telling her about how her dad was joining them soon. Then, he would appear and they would walk off together without her.

  Without me…without me.

  If her dad did die, she and Cora would be the only people remaining in her family. They didn’t have grandparents. Cousins. Aunts. Uncles. Nobody. There had been a great aunt who lived in Hope, which was why they had moved to the crummy town years before, but she had died of old age three years ago.

  Her dad wasn’t the same man he used to be. Not since her mom died. In some ways, he was better than he used to be and in other ways, he was worse. He wasn’t as angry and he didn’t yell as much, but he was prone to depression and often got quiet unless he was trying to dig into her personal life.

  Gwen got it. He wanted to connect with her. He was as alone as she was. Maybe even more alone. But she didn’t want to help him cope with family tragedies. Gwen coped in her way, her dad coped in his way, and they should have just left it at that. For instance, if she was overwhelmed with sadness, or if the stresses of school and having to listen to her dad talk about county matters got to her, she would write down what she felt in a journal.

  She had volumes upon volumes stuffed in her closet—most of it she hoped to never read again. If someone were to find it and read through them, they would have a window into her world. The real Gwen. Not the one she put on for her friends, teachers, or even her dad. Whoever read through them would find out that she had felt nothing when Travis killed himself, or how she felt her mom was being selfish after being diagnosed with breast cancer. They were entries into an adolescent girl’s life filled with selfishness, bitterness, and hatred.

  Yet, she kept them. The entries weren’t like they used to be. Except for the most recent ones, they weren’t who she was now, and she would argue that they weren’t who she was then—that her feelings in the moments of real trials were rarely who she really was.

  She had loved Travis. She had looked up to him. Wanted to be him in some ways. And yet when she looked at the entries of the fourteen-year-old Gwen, she would even find one that said, “I’m glad he’s dead. If he wanted to leave us behind, he should have done it earlier. Good riddance.”

  To Gwen now, at eighteen, she knew that it was little more than a plea for connection—for someone to hold her. Her parents had been hit with grief so hard that they had all but forgotten about Gwen and Cora for a year, it had seemed. Now she wondered if that was true or if that was just something her fifteen-year-old brain had constructed.

  What Gwen’s experiences had shown her over the years was that the truth was fluid in so many ways. Perhaps there were moments when she had needed her parents, but maybe those were moments when they had needed her. Maybe they had needed her to come into the bedroom at night when she had nightmares of Travis shooting himself. Maybe the three of them needed to cuddle in the bed together and cry.

  But they didn’t. Gwen, like her father, kept to herself. Remained cold. Dived into her schoolwork. Ignored emotions or explained them away as best she could. Her mom had gone in the opposite direction. Constantly weeping. Loudly. At night. Sometimes Gwen would even dream of her mom just sitting there crying, years after the tears had dried up.

  When her mom had died six months ago, it was the same kind of grief, but less shocking. The diagnosis had given them a fair warning that things could turn out badly. Knowing that her mother was dying was, in its own way, harder than finding out about a death suddenly, like with Travis. Gwen had had to watch her mom transform both physically and mentally. At the same time, she had to watch her father break in two.

  Since her mom’s passing, Gwen rarely dreamed. But when she did, it was some variation of this one.

  Gwen had tried to stop writing in her journals, especially in the last few months. She didn’t want her bitterness toward her father to be reflected in a book he might find years later, especially if she knew she would feel differently after the passage of time. That was the problem with writing down feelings. They may have shown what she felt in the moment, but they never got to the root of the problem. They never showed what the feelings were trying to mask. The mask was never the true story.

&n
bsp; In the darkness, Gwen looked at the closet and sighed. Journals filled with masks. Lies. Reactions instead of true feelings.

  She had never been emotionless about Travis’s death. She had been devastated. Shocked into what seemed to be emotionlessness. She had never truly thought her mom was being selfish. She felt horror that her mom had to go through something so terrible as cancer—that she had to fight for her life then lose the battle.

  Her journals, her reactions, were all false covers for her fear. And now she feared losing her dad, no matter how much she told herself she hated him.

  She sat up in bed and looked at the clock on her bedside table. There was only darkness where the red digits should have been. Then she picked up her cell phone, but the screen didn’t light up.

  She stood up and rubbed her tired eyes, then she opened the door to the hallway and made her way to the kitchen. She looked at the clock on the microwave, and it was blank too.

  She flipped a light switch. Nothing.

  She looked out the window in the living room to check the weather. The night was still. She glanced to the right and saw that her dad’s police cruiser wasn’t in the driveway, which meant she was in the house by herself.

  She hated it when he was out late on a call. She thought maybe he had to work a county checkpoint looking for drunk drivers. He only did that every now and then, more so to say he did it rather than out of true concern for keeping the roads safe. Gwen wasn’t sure if it had always been the case, but her dad worked now because he needed a job. Not because he cared about bringing people to justice or protecting the citizens of Hope. He had to work to keep food on the table.

  She wondered if he would try to be re-elected once she moved out at the end of the school year and went to college. He might, just for the fact that it didn’t cost him much to do it. It wasn’t like he risked his life with this job. It was Hope, Wisconsin. Nothing happened here.

  She stepped into the kitchen and sat at the bar, looking out the window into the darkness. Something didn’t feel right about this, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She made her way back to the bedroom and checked her phone again. When a blank screen stared back at her, she felt a shiver and realized for the first time that the house was cold. She changed out of her shorts and put on a pair of jeans and a hoodie, doubtful she would be able to go back to sleep quickly.