As Phil had said, once they steered the vessel into the current, progress became swift and easy. While it took some effort and skill with the oars to keep the nose of the dinghy pointing forward, Wyatt quickly got the hang of it, and despite his fear of water, he was soon paddling and changing direction like an experienced boatman.
They didn’t come across anyone for the first few minutes, but when they got closer to the city, they saw a group of people standing on a jetty on the riverbank. The people didn’t seem to be armed and appeared to be more bewildered and scared than anything else. They stared with frightened eyes at Phil and Wyatt as they passed. Nobody waved; they just stared, their faces full of fear and uncertainty. The protracted silence of the moment was eerie and unsettling, and Wyatt and Phil, while keeping a wary eye on the people as they passed, were happy to be away from them. It was an ominous sign of things to come. Phil’s heart went out to the people who were caught up in this disaster, but he knew that there was nothing he could do for them. Large clouds of smoke frequently hovered at the river’s edge, obscuring the sight of what lay beyond the banks.
They continued on along the river, traveling under a bridge that was jam-packed with abandoned cars. A few people were standing on the bridge, and they stared with confusion and worry at the two men in the dinghy as they passed underneath on the rushing river. Again, the silence and forlorn stares of the people on the bridge were deeply unsettling. Neither of the men said anything to each other, but each knew that the other was thinking about this.
There was one more bridge up ahead, around a mile downstream, but this was a huge bridge that funneled freeway traffic into the city and served as one of its main arteries. Phil knew they were entering dangerous territory now, and they’d gone as far as was safely possible on the dinghy. The scattered gunfire they kept hearing every few minutes was louder and closer now, as were screams and shouts of panic.
“Let’s pull up to the bank over there,” Phil said, pointing to the left bank of the river. Further down, the banks became vertical concrete canal sides, so this was one of the last places they could land the craft anyway.
Wyatt offered no protest; he was happy to be getting out of the water. They steered the dinghy over to the bank and beached it, and then climbed out, surveyed the immediate area for any sign of danger, and then holstered their firearms.
“What do we do with the boat?” Wyatt asked.
“Drag it out of the water and leave it and the oars here,” Phil said. “It’s served its purpose for us, but someone else might find some use for it. There are going to be tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people who’ll be desperate for any way out of this city in the next few days. If I can give even two or three of ‘em a little helping hand, I’m happy to do so.”
Wyatt nodded and helped drag the dinghy across the muddy bank as far out of the water as they could before they reached the concrete canal wall, a couple of yards from the water’s edge. Drifts of smoke from a nearby burning building were spilling over the wall and partially obscuring visibility here. A few dozen yards down, some stairs led up the wall onto the promenade that followed the course of the river. Once they were up those stairs, they’d be in the city.
“Get ready,” Phil said to Wyatt, his expression one of grim determination and gritty resolve. “Things are about to get a lot more dangerous.”
Wyatt laconically patted the grips of the .357 holstered on his hip. “I’m ready,” was all he said. Then the two of them jogged up the steps and disappeared into the smoke.
9
When Alice came to, all she could see was billowing clouds of smoke, and the only thing she could hear was a shrill, monotonous whining, screaming deep inside her eardrums and feeling like a dentist’s drill boring into her brain. A sharp pain burned in her midriff, but all she could think about was her son. Despite feeling dizzy and disoriented, she struggled groggily to her feet and screamed. “David! David, where are you?! David!” She dropped to her knees, coughing from the acrid smoke and a burning in her lungs and throat. When she raised her hand to her mouth, she saw that her forearm was covered with blood. Despite her injuries, all she cared about was finding David.
The shrill whining persisted in her ears, and her own voice sounded as if it were coming from a million miles away. Alice staggered through the smoke, coughing and gasping and calling out her son’s name. The ground was strewn with debris and broken glass, and over the ringing in her ears, she could hear someone screaming in pain. It was a woman, though, not David…but whether this was a good sign or a bad one, she did not yet know.
Her foot struck something soft and heavy, and she almost crashed to the ground, regaining her balance at the last second. She looked down and saw a blood-spattered corpse, and she screamed with fright. She’d seen plenty of dead and dying people in the emergency room, of course, but that was different. She expected to see them there and had been mentally and emotionally prepared for it every time she’d gone to work. Seeing bodies here, on the street of this usually safe, friendly city was something entirely different, though. It almost seemed like it couldn’t be real.
Alice knelt down and examined the body with shaking hands. There was no pulse; the victim—a middle-aged man—was certainly dead.
“Mom…” David’s voice was barely louder than a croak, but Alice knew it the second she heard it, even with the terrible ringing in her ears.
She sprang to her feet, relief and joy rushing through her like floodwater from a broken dam, and she forgot temporarily about the burning pain in her midriff.
David was standing there, still as a statue, in a thick, swirling cloud of smoke. Alice ran over to him, desperate to see if he was okay.
“Davey, are you okay, are you hurt, talk to me, talk to me,” she said.
David stared wide-eyed at her midriff and pointed with a trembling hand. “Mom,” he gasped. “Your…you…”
“I’m okay, dammit,” she insisted. “Are you hurt, David? Are you okay? Turn around, let me see your back!”
David gulped, and his eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets, but he did as Alice and said turned around. He was grubby, and bits of debris and small pebbles of broken glass were all over his hair and clothing, but he was uninjured aside from a few minor cuts and scrapes on his arms. Now that Alice knew this, she finally felt okay about looking down at her own injuries…and when she did, she almost passed out. Sticking out of her lower right side was a twisted shard of metal, and around it, her blouse was dark and sticky with blood.
“Mom, you’re, you’re hurt bad,” David murmured, finally managing to utter a complete sentence.
“I’m okay, honey. I’m all right. It looks worse than it is,” she answered. Alice knew she’d have to pull the shrapnel out, but she couldn’t do that just yet. The wound would have to be stitched up right away, and she only had the tools to do that at the apartment. If she pulled it out now, she might lose too much blood to even make it to the apartment. She had no doubt that the stab-proof vest had saved her life. Even though the shrapnel had pierced it, it hadn’t gone deep enough into her flesh to do any serious damage. If she hadn’t been wearing it, though, she had no doubt the twisted metal would have ripped through her stomach and intestines, and she would have died a slow, agonizing death.
“Are you, are you sure, Mom?” David asked, his eyes locked on the blood-covered metal shard.
“Trust me. I’ll be okay. Come on. We have to get—”
A piercing scream from nearby cut Alice off. It was the same woman who’d been screaming before. This time, though, it was quickly followed by a man’s voice, hoarse and desperate.
“Oh my God, Stacey, oh God, oh my God! Help! Someone help us, oh God, Stacey! Someone help us, please!”
Even though she was injured herself, Alice knew she couldn’t just leave an innocent person laying wounded on the sidewalk to fend for themselves. “Come on, Davey,” she said, barely able to hear her own voice over the ringing in
her ears. “Let’s see if we can help.”
She and David moved through the billowing smoke, debris, and broken glass crunching under their every step until they came across a young couple. The man was kneeling down next to the woman and holding her hand, his face contorted with anguish. Her face was a mask of pure agony. Both of them had been injured by the blast, but the woman’s injuries were far worse. One of her legs was badly broken, with the bone sticking through the skin. The wound was bleeding heavily.
Alice hurried over to them. “Excuse me, sir, I’m a nurse. I can help.”
“I, oh God, please help, yes, thank you,” the man stammered.
Alice knelt down, put a pair of nitrile gloves on, and quickly checked the woman over for any other fractures. Thankfully, it seemed it was just her leg that was broken.
“Davey, you need to help him move her, we have to get her off the street.”
“Where to, Mom?” David asked. As crazy as the situation was, he was beginning to regain his composure.
“Can you see anywhere that might be safe?”
David looked up and down the street, narrowing his eyes as he tried to peer through the billowing clouds of smoke. “There! Just a couple yards farther down, the convenience store, it looks like the door got blown off by the blast. We should take her in there.”
“Yeah, good thinking,” Alice said. “I can’t help you carry because of my own injury, but come here, David, hold her under her left armpit. Sir, if you could hold her under her right armpit? Yeah, that’s right. We don’t need to lift her totally off the ground, just hold as much of her weight up as you can,” she instructed. “All right, let’s move people, let’s move.”
David and the man dragged the woman across the glass-littered sidewalk and pulled her into the convenience store. While they were doing that, Alice quickly scoped out the inside of the store, which seemed to be deserted. It was as safe a place as any, for the moment. Once everyone was inside, Alice got to work on the woman and told the guys to move some heavy objects around to barricade the door.
“Take one of these, sweetie,” Alice said to the woman. She handed her a morphine pill—she had a few of them in her bug-out bag—and a bottle of soda from the convenience store fridge. “It’ll help with the pain.”
There was little she could do for the woman with the minimal first-aid equipment she had on her. Still, she knew that she could at least stabilize her condition.
“I’m gonna have to clean up this wound, sweetie, and I won’t lie, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt real bad, but I have to do it, okay? You gotta be brave, just for a few seconds.”
The woman looked terrified, but she could see the compassion in Alice’s eyes and could feel it in her gentle touch, and she trusted her.
“Boys, I’m gonna need you to hold her down while I do this. And give her something to bite down on.”
David hastily scanned the nearby shelves until his eyes alighted on something that would be useful for this purpose. “Will this do, Mom?” He pulled a rubber chew-toy for dogs off a shelf.
“Perfect,” Alice said. She took the label off the chew-toy and got the woman to bite down on it. She then took a bottle of water and an unopened cleaning cloth off a nearby shelf and got some surgical alcohol out of her bag. “You ready, sweetie?” she asked.
With tears in her eyes, the woman nodded and bit harder into the chew-toy.
“Sir, you need to hold her down tight, you, too, Davey.”
The two of them did as Alice said, and she got busy cleaning up the wound where the broken bone was sticking out. First, she used the water to gently wash the area and get any grit and dirt off it.
Then came the part that would cause the woman immense pain: cleaning the wound with surgical alcohol. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but this is gonna hurt. Bite down hard.” Alice did the job as swiftly as she could, and the woman writhed and kicked like a wild bull, screaming horrifically, her cries muted by the chew-toy in her mouth.
David and the man had to use all their strength to hold the woman still.
Finally, Alice finished, and she gave the woman’s hand a quick squeeze. “You did well, sweetie. You’re very brave. I just have to tie a tourniquet now to stem the bleeding, and then we’re done, okay?”
There were tears in the woman’s eyes, but the morphine was starting to kick in, so the ferocious pain was at least beginning to fade a little. She spat the chew-toy out of her mouth. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said hoarsely.
Alice used a T-shirt from a nearby rack to tie a tourniquet around the woman’s thigh and then stood up, as did David and the man.
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” the man said with tears in his eyes. “I don’t know what we would have done without you. Do you, um, do you know what’s happened? What is this, some sort of terrorist attack?”
“Somebody has attacked us, yes,” Alice answered. “Beyond that fact, I don’t know much. I can tell you—as you’ve no doubt already noticed—that nothing electronic is working, and it won’t for some time. Y’all need to get to a hospital as soon as possible; even without much of their equipment working, a surgeon should be able to operate and take care of that leg. Check in the stock room at the back; there should be a hand truck or something like that you can push her in.”
“The nearest hospital is five miles away,” the man said, looking despondent. “You mean to tell me no ambulances are coming?”
Alice grimly shook her head. “No ambulances, no police cars, nothing. You’re going to have to use your muscles to get her to a hospital.”
“I’ll…I’ll do whatever I have to,” he said resolutely. “What are you going to do?”
“My son and I have to get home,” was all Alice said. “And that’s exactly where we’re going now. I wish you two the best of luck. Get moving soon, keep away from crowds, and stay off the main streets. That’s the only advice I can give you.”
“Thank you again, and good luck.”
Alice took David’s hand, and they took one last look at the couple, and then hurried through the store, exiting via the rear entrance into a smoke-choked back alley.
10
Alice and David moved speedily but cautiously through the city, sticking to back alleys where they could, and hurrying across whatever larger streets they came across. Alice made sure to avoid crowds, and whenever she saw groups of people, she would make wide detours to veer around them. She’d already caught sight of a few masked looters, smashing storefront windows and running out with whatever they could carry. On another occasion, the masked men she saw seemed to simply want to destroy things and cause more chaos; they were throwing Molotov cocktails into stores and setting buildings alight. She made sure she made extra wide detours any time she caught sight of such people.
The pain in her midriff from the jagged piece of shrapnel was growing worse, and walking was becoming increasingly difficult and agonizing. She could have taken a morphine pill for the pain, but she refused to do this; it would dull her senses and slow her down, and she needed to be fully mentally alert.
Finally, she and David got to the building where her studio apartment was. She breathed out a sigh of relief; it had taken over two hours of walking to get there, and the whole time she’d been worried that she might find the building on fire or being ransacked by looters. The stores on the ground floor were locked up, but there was no sign that anyone had tried breaking in, nor were there any fires near the building.
“We’re here,” she said to David, and when she turned and looked at him, she could plainly see the relief on his face.
Everything about the apartment had been chosen with disaster survival in mind, specifically that of an EMP attack. There was a mechanical lock on the front door, which was a simple but extremely sturdy steel door set in a small alley to the side of the building. The five-story building was one of the older buildings in the city, and as such, was solidly constructed. There was no elevator, only stairs. There was a water reservoir tank on the r
oof and a fire escape on the side of the building, which wasn’t accessible from the ground.
Alice took the front door key out of her bag, entered the building, and then quickly locked the door behind her. She and David trudged up the four flights of stairs to get to her apartment, one of six apartments on the floor.
She unlocked the door, let David in, and then locked the place up, deadbolting the door shut behind her. While the interior of the apartment had a few standard items of furniture, like a sofa, chairs, a dining table, and all the rest, it was immediately clear to David that this was no regular apartment. A set of water drums had been set up, along with an electronically controlled pump and drain system that flushed them out and refilled them every few days. There were gas canisters for the cooker, gas lamps for illumination, and rifle safes bolted to the wall. While there was a double bed, there were also camping cots in case more people needed to sleep in here. The cupboards were filled with canned, dehydrated, and long-life foods, as well as protein powders and meal replacements that could be mixed with water. Bulletproof vests and gas masks hung from a rack at the back of the room. There was also a cupboard full of clean clothes, and Alice took a T-shirt, a jacket, and some jeans for herself.
“David, could you get some beans or something cooking on the gas stove?” Alice said. “I need to go to the bathroom and take care of my wound.”
“You don’t need any help with that, Mom?” David asked, staring at the bloody shrapnel sticking out of his mother’s midriff doubtfully.
“I can take care of it on my own,” she said. “We both need a good hot meal to keep our energy levels up. You take care of that, please.”
“If you’re sure…”
“I’m sure, David.”
Alice opened one of the cupboards, took out a large medical kit, hobbled into the bathroom, and shut the door behind her. The pain in her midriff was beyond excruciating now. She stripped down to her underwear, cleaned her hands with surgical alcohol, and folded up a clean washcloth to bite down on. She knew that this was going to hurt, but she had to do it without painkillers dulling her senses.
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 19 | EMP Ranch Page 5
