ELE Series | Book 5 | Escape

by Jones, K. J.

  “Then that’s what we do.”

  Phebe and Emily were so exhausted, they needed help getting over the highway metal barricade. Into an underbrush gully and out the other side. Chris knocked down a wire fence for the others. They trudged across a field. Pez routinely checking the scope to make sure they were beelining towards it.

  “I’m so tired of farmhouses,” mumbled Emily.

  Their target house was smaller and less stone-historic than the last one. But it was shelter for the night. The chimney showed it had a fireplace. A large pile of firewood stood near outdoor cellar doors. A wood chopping ax stuck in a stump nearby.

  2.

  The soldiers and Marines circled the clapboard farmhouse to check if it was clear. Windows boarded up. A door at the back opened. A middle-aged man stepped out with a rifle pointed at the women and kids.

  “Get the hell off my property.” His salt-and-pepper oily hair flattened to his face. A lot of beard growth.

  “Drop it,” said Matt.

  The man turned around and saw Matt aiming a shotgun at him.

  “Goddamn it.” The man lowered the rifle.

  Now that the other armed men aimed at the man, Matt could lower his shotgun. He came around the man and took the rifle from his hands.

  “We mean you no harm, sir,” Matt said, backing away. “We just need shelter for the night and then we’ll be on our way.”

  “What you gonna give me in trade?”

  Pez said, “We got fresh ham, sir.”

  “Ham? Fresh?”

  “Slaughtered recent, sir.” Pez left out the pigs had the virus. Some people would freak about that.

  The man’s eyes lit up. “We could have ourselves a good dinner tonight. Come on in.” He spoke with a strong western Pennsylvania accent. “Watch your step here. It’s slippy.”

  They looked to Peter for what to do. He and Pez communicated through glances and nods.

  “Follow him in,” Peter finalized.

  Chris and Brandon took point through the backdoor behind the man.

  The kitchen was a mess. It appeared as if his house no longer had running water. Dirty plates stacked in the sink and across the neighboring counters. Little bugs skittered across plates. A washbasin sat on the table, but little progress in cleaning up.

  “I mostly live in the basement. I got a fire down there. Keeps anyone from hearing me here.”

  “Sir,” Brandon asked, trying to let his Marine-authority-tone hide his suspicion. “Why weren’t you evacuated?”

  “Not a lot of evacuations in this area. We are too close to Shippensburg, I hear. And that place is really bad. So the National Guard gave up before here.”

  “You wouldn’t have a paper map,” asked Matt. “Would you?”

  “I sure would. You need one?”

  “Yes, sir. It would be helpful.”

  They followed the man further into the house.

  “Not to be nebby, but where you trying to get to, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Chris looked at Peter for this word nebby. Peter shrugged; it wasn’t a Boston word.

  “Carlisle. The base.” Matt unloaded the rifle, switched on the safety, yet held onto it, showing he was not feeling the most trustful either.

  “Oh. You’re not too far off.” The man rifled through a rolltop desk overflowing with stacks of papers and knickknacks.

  Their noses still held the smell of fire, but now dust entered their nostrils from the unclean house. Phebe sneezed.

  “You hear anything about it, sir?” Matt asked.

  “It’s an Army base.”

  “Is it still functioning?”

  “That, I do not know. Here it is. Just PA. I needed it to go to Philly once.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Matt stepped forward, took it, stepped back, and unfolded it.

  Beside him, Peter peered at it.

  “So, Shippensburg’s bad?” Peter asked.

  It was the largest city before Carlisle on the map.

  “Yeah. Last I heard. Oh, I’m Abbeny. You are?”

  “Sullivan.” Peter then made the introductions of everyone.

  No one shook the man’s hand. Though they were unbathed, Abbeny seemed worse.

  During introductions, Abbeny breezed right over the two women, Peter noticed. The man’s eyes lingered on the boys too long, especially Tyler. Peter’s stomach tightened. Maybe Abbeny had lost his sons. But Peter found his hand move to Tyler and pull him closer.

  “Huh?” the kid asked.

  “Nothing. Just want to touch your head for good luck.” Peter rubbed the stubbly scalp.

  “Stop,” Tyler whined and moved away.

  Peter laughed at Tyler’s annoyance. What else was he going to say for protectively pulling him close for no apparent reason other than a stir in his stomach? A funny – albeit annoying to the kid – lie worked.

  Peter questioned why he felt this way towards the man. Probably a paranoid overreaction. The fatherhood of a teenager so new to him.

  Since the house looked to have been a wreck before the disaster, they followed him down creaky wooden steps to the basement.

  A cross between a basement and a cellar. A woodburning stove. A couch. A dirt floor. Stacks of yellowing papers, some of which were newspapers. No boxes like people normally kept in basements. And no root cellar, which people normally kept in cellars. It was a strange hybrid of what existed under homes.

  Overflowing ashtrays filled with cigarette butts.

  “You mind.” Peter gestured to the nearest, sitting on a coffee table. “My wife is pregnant.”

  “Oh,” said Abbeny. “I need to clear them out.”

  Matt said, “Could you not smoke around her, please.” He meant it for himself, too, but it sounded better for a pregnant woman.

  “How far are you?” Abbeny asked Phebe, barely glancing at her.

  “Just past my first trimester.” She gave an apologetic glance at Emily.

  “I always wanted children.” Abbeny’s gaze slid over to Tyler.

  Peter’s brow rose. His stomach tightened further, giving off the same warning.

  “How old are you, young man?” Abbeny asked Tyler.

  Tyler looked up at the man like he was a turd. “Old enough.”

  The group refrained from the chuckle their stomachs lurched up.

  “So,” Peter asked. “You don’t have kids?”

  “No. No. Not so lucky. Oh, let me get that.”

  Abbeny took a stack of papers off an old armchair, a fabric pattern that matched the old couch.

  Emily sat down with, “Thank you.” She looked at the chair as if it would give her herpes. Her coat remained on.

  “Oh, I need to stoke the fire. Can’t let that go out. Running low on wood in here.”

  “I’ll go fetch you some,” said Chris. “You wouldn’t have a spare cigarette, would ya?”

  Matt shot a look at the nicotine addict who had been weeks without a fix.

  “Sure,” Abbeny answered. “Where you from? The way you talk.”

  “The South.”

  “Come a long way.”

  “Yes, sir. Been around.”

  “I’ll go out with ya. Need a smoke, too. Don’t want to be smoking in front of the mother-to-be.” He flashed a yellowed teeth smile at Phebe.

  As soon as he was up the stairs, Phebe turned to Peter. “Is that guy not creepy?”

  “I think he is very creepy.”

  “Oh. My. God,” said Emily. “We are really staying here tonight? This guy could be a serial killer.”

  “Don’t they usually have cleaner houses?” asked Brandon.

  “This place reeks of cigarettes.”

  “Ladies,” said Pez, which he meant to any complaining men, too. “It’s nightfall out there. Not only is the temperature going below freezing, but what he said about being so close to Shippensburg, it could be dangerous. We just tolerate it until dawn and we’re on our way again. Can we agree on this?”

  “Yeah,” Emily mumbled.<
br />
  Brandon sighed, not liking his girlfriend was so unhappy. “We’ll make it work, right, Em?”

  “I said I would, okay?”

  “Yeah, hon.” A worried look on his face.

  Peter snooped. He lifted couch cushions.

  “What are you doing?” Phebe tilted as he tried to look under the cushion she was sitting on.

  “Looking for what we got here.”

  “Under the cushions?”

  “That’s a place people hide things.”

  “Are you going bonkers?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We’ll just eat and go to sleep.” Phebe gestured closeness with her hands. “All together.”

  “Down here?” asked Tyler. “Not a lot of room. And the guy’s creepy. And it smells.”

  “The whole house smells,” Phebe said, still suffering from her pregnancy super smeller. “But down here the worst. The cigarettes.”

  “I’ll throw them out.” Peter gathered the ashtrays.

  It reminded him of his maternal grandmother’s apartment in the projects. Not happy memories. Smokers like Chris didn’t usually remind him of her. Overflowing ashtrays did the trick. Abbeny’s cigarette butts only lacked bright lipstick lip marks to be a perfect flashback of his childhood.

  “I’ll do it,” Jayce said, reaching his hands out to take them from Peter. “I need to keep busy.”

  “Yeah, okay. Just throw them outside. I don’t think this guy is a neat freak.”

  Phebe chuckled. “Having an OCD fit, Irishman?”

  “God, yes.” Peter glanced at departing Jayce for using God, but the kid didn’t stop his ascent of the stairs. “I’m itching to clean up this whole place.”

  “You and me both,” said Pez. “How can someone live this way?”

  “Maybe,” said Emily, “if we slept upstairs. Get those fireplaces going. Ya think?”

  “We’d be more comfortable,” said Peter. “We’ll do that.”

  Pez nodded his agreement.

  3.

  The huge war room was a bay of cubicles populated by emergency workers, all of whom looked to need a stiff drink or five. FEMA people were present, which struck Mazy odd since FEMA had the buildings on top of the mountain. Acronyms of a multitude of agencies ran around or talked on headset phones while typing on computers. Some fatigued people. The place looked like controlled chaos. So many voices talking to people not present created a strange din.

  Flat screens dominated all of the tall walls. One above another, the screens were everywhere. Each readout one kind of disaster after another.

  Mazy noticed the screens that tracked human activities, from healthy to zom. Lootings. Rioting. The evac-turning-Zone states. The Zone states. On and on it went. She realized Lt. Kite would be at the other end of their phones.

  Scanning the walls of flatscreens, one caught Mazy’s attention. The heading at the top told the information pertained to Oil Refineries.

  Uh-oh. How were oil refineries involved in a mosaic of disasters?

  She stepped closer and squinted her eyes to see across the distance better.

  A series of red dots on the map blinked red – never a good sign. They were all in the Zone or along the about-to-be-Zoned Gulf Coast areas. An entire line of blinking red dots followed the Louisiana and East Texas coastal area.

  What the hell did that mean?

  A woman rose from her cubicle and yelled, “Where the hell are those troops for Citgo in Georgia?” She held her hand over a phone’s mouthpiece, yet also wore a phone headset, giving the impression she was communicating on two lines simultaneously.

  “On route,” a fatigued man yelled back. “Two hours out.”

  “Well, Citgo’s going up. They are under attack right now.” She sat down.

  Georgia. Mazy searched for the outline of the state in the southeast. One dot, orange, not blinking.

  “Citgo’s got explosions,” the woman yelled.

  As Mazy watched the map, the orange turned red and blinked.

  “These are refineries gone,” she muttered.

  How many could go before America plunged into a fuel shortage?

  A guy from the next cubicle stood up. “I got workers leaving Hunt.”

  “Tell them to stay or they’ll be shot for treason.”

  Mazy looked over to where the gruff male voice came from and snapped into a salute. An Army three-star general walked the floor. He returned her salute, then ignored her. Fine with her. His deep frown made him appear quite unfriendly.

  Her mind raced on everything she knew about oil refineries. Something about them blowing up easily and if one storage tank went, all the storage tanks daisy-chained exploded. Was that happening here? She looked at the red blinking ones.

  Didn’t oil refineries burn forever, polluting the air with their toxic smoke?

  Mazy’s gaze spotted a screen off on another wall further away. It made her heart drop into her stomach, for the section held a nuclear symbol. Blinking dots, but orange, not red.

  Making her way around cubicles and glancing at the General to monitor if she was doing anything wrong, she made her way to that wall. And regretted it.

  The labels told her it was nuclear reactor shutdowns. The map key told a shutdown was an orange triangle, not blinking. But an orange dot told the spent fuel cooling pools were on diesel generators. The blinking ones were generators running out of fuel. What happened if they went red, then blinked?

  The cubical people worked at an even more frantic feverish pitch in this nuclear area.

  A man stood up and yelled, “I got a goddamn nuke pool about to go if fuel isn’t there within three hours!”

  The General barked, pointing at people, “Get that fucking diesel there now! Priority!”

  An urge to cry, Mazy felt. Who knew life had grown this precarious? They flipped their light switches and plugged in their electronics, drove their cars and cursed at interactive GPS maps not getting directions right, all without thinking they lived on a knife’s edge. One nasty shove and the same things which gave them such luxuries would kill them.

  All across the nation, the cooling pools. Mazy had no idea there were so many. Seventy of them at least. Most gathered east of the Mississippi, in the R140 strike zone. A huge collection in Illinois and North Carolina. One was near Wilmington.

  These people, working in a desperate frenzy, were trying to keep the diesel generators of the offline nuclear power plant’s cooling pools going. Or they would meltdown, taking a twenty-mile radius with them. The radiation would be terrible even beyond that.

  Some states were brighter on the map. The Zoned ones were of a darker color, showing their electricity was gone.

  “PA’s going dark,” a male voice yelled. “Auto shut down happening.”

  “Okay, people,” the General bellowed. “We got a grid collapse about to happen.”

  Raven Rock was in PA, but Mazy seriously doubted they were on the electricity grid.

  Not two minutes later, a male voice yelled, “Grid shut down. Grid shut down. Grid shutdown.”

  Several people cursed, with “fucks” and “shits.”

  The Northeast went dark on the map.

  “Oh, God!” Mazy slapped her hand over her mouth.

  But most of Massachusetts remained illuminated.

  “Start the clock,” a voice yelled. “Three days till refuel for all of those pools.”

  There was a huge amount of them. Ohio was in the grid of the northeast. Mazy knew that most of the electrical systems in the nation were gridded together. When one went offline, the other received a signal of something wrong on the line and automatically shut down. Everyone knew this after the big blackout of the northeast some years ago.

  The workers revved up to an even more manic level and looked beyond stressed out.

  “Where’s the coal shipments?” the General barked. “How’s the grid disconnect going?”

  “Slow, sir,” a male voice responded.

  “It needs to speed the
hell up. These are millions of lives we are holding in our hands, people.” They did not look as if they needed to be reminded of that awesome responsibility. Yet, he continued, “That land is destroyed if these go. Starving children, people.” He really needed to shut up.

  Mazy headed for the door.

  Into the corridor, she saw a man resting his back against the wall. He looked wiped out. The ID hanging on his lanyard told he was part of the nuclear workers.

  “How bad it is?” Mazy asked, afraid of the answer. “The nuclear meltdown issue?”

  “Let me put it this way,” he responded. “There are over seventy thousand tons of spent fuel rods in the United States alone.”

  “How the hell can we survive this if all of them go?”

  His tone flattened. His gaze met hers. “We don’t.” He turned away and began to walk towards the bathrooms.

  Mazy stared without seeing.

  “Oh.” He turned back to her. “If someone were wanting to live it out for a while until cancer kills them, they’d go west. The Plains and southwest have the least.”

  The Plains. South Dakota. Rosebud Reservation. Mazy needed to talk to Ben. Her feet headed towards the way out.

  The guy called down the corridor, “Europe’s worse.”

  4.

  The house warmed up from the fireplaces. However, the bordering-on-being-a-hoarder situation made it impossible for everyone to sleep in the living room together. Not enough floor space and they did not have sleeping bags anymore since those hadn’t been thrown out the windows of the previous house. The boys opted to share a bedroom upstairs, and they didn’t seem disturbed by the idea of using Abbeny’s bedding, which was already on the beds. Whereas all of the adults were utterly horrified by the idea of sleeping in his bedding on his questionable beds. Ideas of bed bugs and, if not that, simply the yuck factor. Not only did everything contain an inch of dust, but the pillow cases had oily hair stains. Who knew what condition the mattresses were beneath the fitted sheets?

  Abbeny stayed in the basement.

  Phebe wrapped herself in her coat as her bedding and went to the couch. Chris, who volunteered as firekeeper, let her have it. Matt and Brandon found sheets in a linen closet and made pallets on bedroom floors. A big meal of pork, and a warm house after all day walking, they all fell sound asleep quickly.