by Bowman, Dave
Slowly, carefully, Jack moved farther along the wall. Then, just as he rounded the corner, he froze. Someone was moving inside the office.
The boots clicked as the man ran across the concrete floor, then out the back door. Jack moved toward the window and watched as the man ran outside.
He listened as he heard a car door open.
The Pathfinder! The man was going to escape!
Jack entered the office quickly and glanced around. It was empty. He approached the back door, keeping his back flat against the wall.
He was prepared to fire. He was prepared to fight for the car.
Suddenly, two shots broke the silence of the night.
Someone outside in the yard had fired.
Jack crouched down, ready to shoot. He leaned forward, just a bit, to look out the back door.
The man with the boots was staggering backward against the Pathfinder. His arm fell limply at his side, and his gun fell to the ground.
Finally, he fell to the dirt as well – first his knees, then his torso, then his head with a dull thud.
Jack scanned for the shooter.
Off to the side, just ten feet from the vehicle, lay the beaten, bloodied man they had just been torturing minutes before. He lay in the dirt where they had left him.
Apparently, his captors hadn't finished the job of killing him.
He had used the last strength in his body to prop himself up and shoot at the man wearing boots. Now, he fell down into the dirt once more.
He groaned. It took Jack a moment to realize the man was trying to form words.
Slowly, Jack opened the door into the yard and inched out. He scanned the entire space, looking for any threats.
“Shoot me,” begged the man, and Jack realized the man was speaking to him. “Can't do it myself. End it for me.”
Jack cautiously approached the man. When he was close enough to see him, his stomach turned. He was so disfigured, it was a wonder he was still alive.
“Do it,” he said through the gurgling noises in his throat.
He was clearly in agony. There was no way he could be saved.
Jack swallowed. He took a step forward, raising his gun toward the man.
He fired.
The man went limp. Jack watched as the life drained out of him. He was finally at peace.
Jack looked around the lot full of cars. There was no movement. He was the only one still standing.
He picked up the gun that had been used to kill the man in boots. Then he walked over to that man and looked him over. Surprisingly, the leader of the group didn't have a gun on him. But he had something even better – the keys to the Pathfinder.
Jack slid behind the steering wheel and turned the key. The engine started.
Jack grinned.
He would be making it home after all.
He killed the engine, hopped out, then quickly went around to the three other downed men and collected their guns and what little extra ammunition they had. He returned to the office briefly and found a bit more ammo for two of the pistols.
Then, he was off. He whipped the Pathfinder around and left the junkyard forever.
He drove toward the highway, swung the vehicle onto the road. The headlights revealed Naomi and Brent where he had left them.
“It's Jack!” Naomi exclaimed to Brent, smiling.
“I was afraid I had lost you back there,” Brent said. “You made it!”
Jack smiled. “Are y'all going to get in, or do you want to keep walking?”
They grabbed their bags off the pavement and tossed them in the back. Without wasting any more time, the two of them hopped in.
Jack did a U-turn and pointed the Pathfinder east. He drove off, leaving Los Angeles behind.
He hoped never to return.
17
Paul was still in the woods.
He had spent most of the night fumbling through the pines, getting cut and scraped. Now, a sound interrupted his aimless wandering.
He came to a stop and listened.
He hadn't heard that in a long time. He couldn't remember how long it had been.
It was a child's laughter.
He sat down so he could be still and hear it better. He didn't know where the child was, but it was unmistakable. A youngster, maybe a toddler, babbling and giggling.
He didn't hear it after a few minutes. So he started walking again, this time in search of something – that sound. The woods had thinned out, and now he was coming to the edge of the forest. He looked out across a field and for the first time in days, had a clear view of the sky. He saw the first signs of dawn to the east.
And then he heard the kid's voice again. It was coming from the house on the other side of the field. The house had a fence all around the backyard, where a mother played with her little boy.
The sound seemed to wake something in him. Something that had been asleep.
He lumbered forward toward the house. The woman looked up, saw him, and became afraid. She stared at him for a moment, frozen. Then she scooped up her child.
“No, wait,” Paul mumbled, raising his hand.
The woman carried the child in the back door of the house and disappeared inside.
Paul hadn't meant to frighten them. He turned away and took cover again in the woods.
Behind him, the door to the house opened again. A man's voice shouted something about a gun. Paul walked deeper into the woods. He shouldn't have bothered those people, he realized.
He walked for a while until he came to a fallen tree. He took a seat and watched as the sky began to light up. Finally, it was morning.
He had to figure this out.
Where was he?
Why was he wandering through the woods?
His thinking was muddied. His thoughts came as if through fog. His mind felt thick and slow. How had he gotten like this? He looked down at his clothes. He was filthy. How long had he even been out here in the woods?
He shook his head as if trying to wake from a bad dream. He blinked his eyes and frowned.
Suddenly, like a punch in his stomach, it all came back to him.
The bomb. Finding them in the house: all dead. All gone.
And then he had slipped into some kind of daze, or trance. And he'd been walking ever since.
Paul had never done anything like that. He'd never before gone into some kind of half brain-dead, amnesiac, trance state.
He felt a potent mixture of shame, rage, and grief. Unbearable, blinding grief.
The birds overhead had woken up. They serenaded him as the sunlight filtered through the trees. He sat in the forest and remembered.
He had been out working when it started. That week, he and his crew had been logging an area farther from home than usual. It was deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas.
Something strange happened.
All the saws and trucks had just stopped working. All at once. It was the damnedest thing. There was nothing to do but go home. And no way to get there except by foot.
So he set out toward his house. He and his wife were in over their heads on a mortgage for a four-bedroom house in a far-flung suburb east of Dallas. They had always been worried about making the payments, on top of buying everything their three kids needed.
But as he had covered the miles on the state highway headed northwest that day, the old concerns about money and bills seemed so far away. Because the closer he got to home, the tighter the ball of worry grew in his chest. Marie and the kids were all that mattered. If he could just get home to them and make sure they were all right, he promised himself he would never argue with her about money again.
Then, there was the explosion. It happened so far away that it wasn't very loud where he was. But he could tell it was huge. He walked faster.
As he traveled through the area southeast of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, he began to see the damage. And each town, each neighborhood, was a little worse than the one before it. He ran the last few miles, his heart racing, h
is sense of dread building.
It was dark by the time he made it to his town. He had lost track of time, but he guessed when he thought of it now, it had been after midnight. But even in the darkness, he could see everything was destroyed.
The small city had been demolished.
Its streets were empty except for when the wind would pick up some dust or pieces of plastic and toss them around. Everything – everyone – had been destroyed.
Streets were littered with rubble. Buildings had been leveled. The ground was a sea of broken bricks, concrete, shattered glass, and endless debris. He could see dead bodies buried under the remnants of cars and buildings.
In a panic, he picked his way through the street. It made no sense that his family could have survived, but he still held hope. Maybe, just maybe . . .
He turned the corner into his cul-de-sac. Paul stood with his mouth open, gazing at the pile of bricks, beams, and glass that had been his home. Terror and shock coursed through his body, confusing him, disorienting him.
But there was still hope!
Perhaps his family had escaped in time! Maybe his wife had run for shelter, away from the city, with the children.
Surely she had. Surely they had survived!
Paul would have to search through the house to assure himself that their bodies weren't there.
He began to pick through the destroyed materials, recognizing destroyed windows, furniture, walls. Everything had an acrid smell – of chemical fire and Paul didn't know what else. It singed his nostrils, and the clouds of dust that rose from the piles made him cough. He searched on. He dug through the heap, losing his footing and cutting himself countless times.
At first he found nothing. Maybe his hope had been correct – they had escaped!
But then, he saw it.
An arm, poking out from under a pile of bricks and broken furniture.
A lump formed instantly in his throat, closing it up and spreading into his lungs. His eyes filled with tears, blurring his vision. He moved the rubble aside.
“No, no, no, no,” he muttered to himself.
He found his little girl. Next to her were her two big brothers. And behind them was Marie.
All dead.
A wave swept over Paul.
The sensation that had started in his throat spread through his body. He heard a roaring, rising sound, then realized it was coming from his own voice. The pain took him over as he released a primal scream into the darkness.
And after that, he could remember almost nothing.
He knew he had started walking. He headed back east, back toward the woods. But he had not been thinking. His mind had turned off, checked out.
All that was left of Paul pushed him forward, away from the bloodied, dismembered bodies, and toward the emptiness of the woods.
And he had kept walking. He had been driven by some strange urge to keep moving, as if he would have to face the pain if he stopped.
And now it was catching up to him, finally. Now that he had woken from the strange state he had been in for the past few days – how long had this been going on, after all? – he was feeling the full brunt of the pain. Intense, searing pain.
He had been running from it, his mind had shut off – anything to avoid it. But now there was no way out.
From his place on the fallen tree, he began to sob.
How could his family be gone? It didn't seem real. How could this nightmare really be happening? But he had seen them, lying there under the rubble with their bodies broken and contorted.
Suddenly, he desperately wanted to return to his half-asleep state. He wanted to be numb. He wanted to not be aware that his family was gone. But his consciousness blazed on, as strong as the sun that was rising overhead. There was no escape.
He cried out in agony, sending the birds scattering overhead. No one else was there to hear him.
18
Brent drove the Pathfinder down the interstate as the sun rose. Naomi slept in the passenger seat, and Jack was asleep in the back.
They were traveling east. The rising sun blinded him a little if he wasn't careful, but he didn't mind. Being in a vehicle made everything better. For one, they were a lot more protected than walking in the street. They could conserve their energy. And most importantly, they were moving at eighty miles per hour instead of about two miles an hour on foot. Now, they had a shot at making it back home to Texas.
Brent had volunteered to take the first shift driving while the other two slept. Though Jack never complained, Brent knew he was exhausted and needed to rest.
They had decided to drive night and day in shifts while the others rested. That way, they would get home as quickly as possible.
Home. The word struck Brent as almost odd. Did he even have a home to return to?
After everything they had been through the past three days, Brent had more faith in Jack than ever. He still couldn't believe that Jack had faced off three or four guys to get the Nissan. And all the other conflicts and run-ins they had had. Sticking with Jack and missing that work meeting back in LA on Wednesday had been the best decision of his life. And he shuddered to think of how close he came to ignoring Jack's warning and walking into that building downtown. If he had done that, he wouldn't still be alive.
Jack said they would make it home to Texas. And if Jack said it, the last three days had taught Brent that he would find a way to make it happen.
Still, though, the odds were stacked against them. Brent had put almost a hundred miles between them and East LA. They had at least 1,300 miles to go. And who knew what they would find in Texas. Jack's house in the country could have been blown to smithereens for all they knew. And if anything had happened to Annie – well, Brent didn't want to think about that. He knew that it would destroy Jack to lose her. And that simply couldn't happen.
Brent was worried about Naomi as well. Just a few hours ago, she had wanted to give up completely and stay behind on the highway. At times, Brent was worried she would just walk off when they weren't looking and disappear, never to come back. But he didn't want that to happen. He had seen the good in her. And he knew that despite everything she had been through, she could return to her old self. If she could just hold on long enough for that to happen.
But that's what worried him. Maybe she couldn't hold on.
He glanced over at her, her small frame curled up on the seat, breathing lightly. Jack had said once that Naomi was a fighter. He hoped there was some part of her that was fighting now. Fighting against the darkness that threatened to take her over.
There had hardly been a chance to think much the past three days. But when Brent considered the future, he was completely overwhelmed with questions. Were his friends and family still alive? Had his home in Austin been blown up by a bomb? How would life ever return to normal after so much destruction?
Somehow, he knew that life would never be what it was before.
Everything was different. And there was so much he needed to learn to survive in this new world. And the first thing was to learn how to fight.
He knew that it had been dangerous to try to back Jack up with the pistol. Brent didn't know how to handle a gun. He could have accidentally shot himself or Jack. But last night when he was waiting up at the highway, he knew he had to do something. Jack had been gone too long.
And Brent's plan had worked. He had surprised the guy pointing a gun at Jack, and Jack had shot the guy. And now here they were, riding in their own working vehicle. At long last.
So Brent was glad he had gone down there to the junkyard. The next time, though, he wanted to be able to use the gun to shoot it if necessary, and not merely to bluff.
Jack said that they could do a little target practice on the highway that morning after he and Naomi got some sleep. Brent was looking forward to that. He wanted to be able to defend himself and his friends. He didn't want to always have to depend on Jack. And he knew that he needed to pick up some slack now with Naomi being pretty much out of commi
ssion.
It was time for Brent to step up and take some responsibility. He couldn't rely on others to save him every time. If he could learn how to use those firearms they had, maybe he would have a shot at making it in this crazy new world.
The sun was rising higher in the sky.
Brent had been wrong about some things. He still didn't like that they had stolen the vehicle. But without it, they might have ended up dead on the road, one way or another. Brent definitely didn't like the idea of shooting people. But if it was between his life or someone else's, he figured he would be able to pull the trigger.
They were getting closer to the California state line. They passed a sign that read, “White Rock, Arizona – 260 miles.”
No doubt they would make it out of California that day and maybe even through Arizona and into New Mexico. Soon, they would get all the way to Central Texas. Brent didn't know what to expect along the way, but he wanted to be prepared for anything.
19
Oscar clasped his hands behind his back and looked out the picture window of his new home.
Things couldn't have been going better.
He had sent a group of his men out to the highway, and another to the major thoroughfare through his section of town. He had another group of trusted workers out raiding homes and businesses in the area. They would bring everything useful to his headquarters. Already, they had amassed a stockpile that would feed them for weeks. They had a good fleet of bicycles. And they were slowly working on finding running vehicles.
They had a good collection so far, but it was really their weak link. There just weren't enough cars that still ran. And that limited them. Without enough vehicles, they couldn't go far enough to scout for new areas and resources. They had plenty of gas – they had taken over every gas station in the area. And they had an engineer that helped them devise a system to bring up the gas from underground at the stations. So they were good on fuel. Very good. Now they just needed cars.
Oscar's goal was to get ten more running vehicles over the next couple of days. That would bring their total fleet to twenty. And then, they could expand their territory.
