Weathering The Storm (Book 5): Downburst

by Soward, Kenny

  “Barbara made up a new shift schedule,” Todd explained. “We’ll need one person watching the gate at all times—that will be shared between myself, Frank, Karen, and Natasha. We’ll all keep tabs on Kayla. She’s just resting now anyway.”

  “Her primary issues are no longer physical.” Natasha pursed her lips and wound up another forkful of pasta. “Her issues will come from inside her head. We could really use a good psychologist or counselor.”

  “We’ll all just have to be her counselors, for now,” Sara said. “How did she respond to Astro and Rex?”

  “She played with them a bit,” Dion said. “Little Astro made her smile a couple of times. You know that thing he does when he smashes up against you and rolls over in your lap to get belly rubs?”

  “Classic Astro move,” Sara nodded. “It’s good to hear that she responded.” She pointed her empty fork at Dion and then back at herself. “What about me and Dion? Aren’t we going to watch the gate, too?”

  “You two will walk the grounds evenings and into the morning.”

  “I’ll take the morning,” Dion suggested, “so you can get back on a normal sleep schedule. “It will leave you more daylight to scavenge and oversee any work.”

  Sara nodded her head. “Even so, we can’t cover all three shifts.”

  “No, but I figure watching the gate during the day won’t be a problem.” Todd looked over at Barbara for help.

  “Most of us will be awake,” the girl explained. “It’s just the early evenings we’re worried about. Someone could slip by in the dark, especially with the weather covering them.”

  “What about when we’re working on projects?”

  Barbara looked askance at Todd. “We tried to think of every angle, but there’s just going to be gaps no matter how we do it. At least this way we’ve got eyes on the gate at all times.”

  “It’s a good duty rotation,” Sara agreed, tapping the paper and sliding it back over. “Like you said, there are some gaps, but that can’t be helped.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Natasha said.

  “What’s that?” Barbara looked back and forth between Natasha and Sara.

  “Who’s going to cover your shift when you leave?”

  Barbara’s face turned red for a moment before she looked down at the table.

  Natasha had confided in Sara before dinner that the two were nearly inseparable, and Sara had agreed. She’d even say the two were absolutely head over heels about each other. It was the way she looked at her son. The way they respected each other and worked together on plans like the guard roster and gate.

  As long as they were honest with Sara and didn’t break the rules, she could tolerate the situation. Besides that, Barbara was quickly growing on Sara. The girl was as solid as a rock in tough situations.

  “We’re not exactly sure when Barbara will be leaving,” Todd said, visibly squirming. “She likes it here, right, Barbara?”

  Barbara looked from Todd to Sara with an expression of mild panic that pleased Sara for some mysterious reason. So, you do have emotions, girl.

  “That’s right, Missus Walton,” Barbara said. “Being that you fought for the Good Folk and promised them some use of the cabins, it’s only right that I stay and help defend them. But, don’t worry. We’ll respect…” The girl’s words trailed off as she looked around in embarrassment, realizing she was talking about her and Todd’s relationship in front of everyone. She composed herself and finished in a calmer tone. “We won’t disrespect you with regards to the living situation.”

  Sara stared at Barbara for a moment before her eyes slid to Natasha. “Isn’t it fun watching these two squirm?”

  “Absolutely.” Natasha nodded her head and chuckled.

  “You were goofing with us,” Todd said, incredulously. “You were going to let Barbara stay anyway?”

  “Of course. We’d love to have Barbara stay if she wants to,” Sara said. Her other thoughts she kept to herself as emotions welled up inside her. Besides, son, it’s not like I can keep you from doing what you want to do. Not if you really and truly want to do something. We’ve seen that already.

  “Great, Mom. Thanks.” Todd nodded briefly to Barbara, then he quickly lifted his tone. “Oh, and we’ll try to think up some more projects, too. We want to try and make use of the mountain. You know, rig some rocks to fall from overhead or something.”

  “That sounds like a pretty big engineering job to me, but if you think you can do it, then it’s fine with me.” Sara looked around the table to see if anyone was opposed to Barbara staying for an extended period. No one seemed to be. Dion picked up his plate and took it to the sink, giving it a quick rinse. Natasha seemed to have drifted off in thought as she finished her dinner.

  Sara pushed her empty plate away from her, stood, and crossed the kitchen floor to the black case resting on the end table. She unhooked the latches on the front and slid the large computer device out smoothly along a set of tracks, setting it atop the case where she could get a better look at it.

  She flipped up a screen, pulled out a sleek-looking keyboard from its nest, and ran her fingers over the keys. Bending down, Sara pulled the power cable from the case and glanced at the wall socket. She didn’t want to waste valuable electricity on the computer, but if she could turn it on, and it wasn’t password protected, they might be able to use it to their advantage. On the other hand, she had no idea what the device might do if she turned it on. It could have a tracker inside. Or possibly even explode.

  Sara wrapped the power cable up and put it back inside the case. “I think I’ll hold off on plugging it in until we can have a tech specialist look at it.”

  “Smart move,” a gruff voice said.

  Sara turned to see Tex standing behind Barbara and Todd. “Tex, you look great.” Sara stepped back, surprised to see the man up and walking. He’d been in and out of consciousness since he’d first woken up and called her beautiful, so she wasn’t sure how much he remembered of their conversation. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve certainly felt a lot worse. Could I beg a glass of water from you?”

  Natasha got up and went over to the weak-kneed man and took hold of his elbow. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  Tex nodded and allowed himself to be guided to the chair. He took his time lowering himself into the seat, as if every joint in his body was sore and creaky.

  “One glass of water coming up.” Sara went to pour a cool glass of water for the man. After placing it in front of him, she gave him a little room and watched as he lifted the glass in a shaking hand and brought it to his lips.

  Tex gulped down the entire glass of water in a dozen seconds or less, setting the glass down on the table with a clank and smack of his lips. “Now that was the best glass of water I ever drunk.” He gave Sara a wide smile, his bushy mustache dancing across his upper lip.

  “I think it’s drank, actually,” Dion corrected the man with a friendly chuckle.

  “Not where I’m from, young man.” Tex looked around with a pair of bright, curious eyes. “Boy, is it good to be back in the world of the living. Can anyone tell me what happened? It’s all a little fuzzy.”

  “You were shot several days ago,” Natasha said with a flat expression.

  “We got into a fight with some of the terrorists—the crawlers,” Todd said. “You got hit in the side. I took you to Trailmarker’s, but Carla had her hands full, so I brought you here.”

  “To this wonderful nurse lady,” Tex gestured toward Natasha.

  “Call me Tash.” She came over and placed her hand on Tex’s forehead, studying his skin color for a moment before she picked up his empty glass and went to pour him some more water.

  “It’s all coming back to me now,” Tex nodded. “We plugged those crawlers full of holes, didn’t we, son?”

  “Sort of,” Todd’s tone was doubtful. “We hit a couple of them, but they got away.”

  “Well, you can’t win ’em all, I suppose.”

/>   “So, you agree that we shouldn’t plug in this computer?” Sara asked, crossing her arms.

  Tex lifted his hand and stuck his index finger at the device. “That right there is a trap.”

  Sara’s brows furrowed as fear picked at her brain. “How can you be sure?”

  “It looks like a piece of crawler gear. They found similar types of stuff in Memphis and around the Knoxville area. Got it off dead crawlers. And if it’s a piece of crawler gear, that means it definitely has a tracker on it.”

  “It’ll make the next part easier.” Sara pushed the computer back into its case. Then she buckled the side and started to lift the entire thing off the table.

  Tex stepped forward, holding out his hand. “What are you doing, Sara?”

  “I’m going to throw it off the side of the mountain.” Sara hefted it to her chest. The case was heavy, but not heavy enough to shove it off her back deck and watch it tumble down to smash against the cliffs. “I’m not going to put my family in any more danger than is necessary. It’s bad enough I even brought the thing here.”

  “Now wait just a second,” Tex said, alarmed at Sara’s sudden determination. “It still could be of use to us, or the military.”

  “Convince me quickly,” Sara challenged with a grim tone, “before I turn this thing into spare parts.”

  Chapter 9

  Jake, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania | 6:45 p.m., Saturday

  Jake pulled into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania just as the afternoon turned to evening. A dark haze settled over the expressway in lieu of the dying wind, and Jake had heard several military jets fly over him low in the clouds to indicate the worst of the weather was over. He didn’t know much about Harrisburg except that it was Pennsylvania’s state capital and had strong military ties.

  He hoped it was a safe military checkpoint like back in White Plains. He could use some information on I-81 and the convoy. The trip would have been a pleasure if not for the ominous presence of the crawlers who could hit him at any moment. The landscape was lush with trees as their fall-colored leaves brushed at the cold, gray clouds, as if trying to paint them with their color.

  The trip had been three hours of white-knuckle driving with the radio off and his ears and eyes focused on his surroundings. There had been stretches of highway with semi-regular traffic, although it had mostly been barren. Jake noticed the people behind the wheels were gripping them as if their lives depended on it, just like him. They’d passed him and exited the expressway as soon as they could without so much as a glance in his direction.

  The only sound that added to the screaming wind was a rattling noise coming from the front of the Explorer, likely something in the frame starting to fall to pieces after barreling through that car back in Suffern.

  Jake might need to swap out his vehicle soon; that was better done before it broke down than after. Maybe after Harrisburg, he’d pull off at a quiet, country exit and hot-wire himself something new to finish his journey.

  He passed a sign for Downtown Harrisburg, cutting through the ghostly mist like a ship through strange waters. Jake was forced to slow down to a mere thirty-five miles per hour, a crawl compared to what he was doing before. A moment later, the mist cleared, and Jake caught sight of a bridge coming up in just a few hundred yards.

  Sparks like fireworks bathed the center of the bridge in an eerie red glow, and at first Jake thought it was some construction crew out working on the structure. Maybe the crawlers had damaged the bridge at some point, and someone was trying to repair it.

  More sparks burst from the near side of the bridge and cut straight to the other side, causing something to explode in a ball of angry orange flames. Jake pulled over and stopped. That was tracer fire. There was a fight happening right on the bridge. As if to agree with him, a Humvee roared out of the mist behind Jake’s Explorer and flew past him, its big diesel engine clanking as it rushed to join the fight.

  “I wasn’t invited to this party,” Jake murmured to himself through tight lips. He pulled forward to the next entry ramp and turned sharply right, going against traffic to get off the bridge. Considering there were no other cars on the road, he didn’t think anyone would complain.

  Once reaching the main road, Jake jumped a shallow median into the other lanes and entered an empty bank parking lot. He swung the Explorer around and pulled into a spot, sitting there with the engine idling. Grabbing his map from the passenger seat, Jake opened it and spread it out before him.

  He found Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the bridge he’d just gotten off of, estimating that he was on North Front Street. He traced a route south with his finger down to where North Front Street connected with another bridge that spanned the Susquehanna River. If he could cross there, he could find his way back to I-81 and bypass all the fighting.

  Folding up the map and returning it to the passenger seat, Jake got back on North Front Street and headed south. He crossed beneath the bridge where the battle was taking place and found himself cruising through a blocky area of subdivisions and small businesses. A thin strip of dirt and trees separated him from the Susquehanna River on his right. Gaps in the trees exposed several long islands covered with a bristle of forest out in the water.

  The streets were covered in three feet of mist rolling off the river, laying still across the road like a blanket of dew. Jake flipped on his high beams, only succeeding in making the mist glow even more, bathing everything in an unholy light. His breathing grew quick and shallow as he listened to the distant percussions of machine guns and explosions.

  Soon, the mist swallowed the entire bottom halves of homes and obscured the river view completely. He could barely see twenty yards in front of him. Letting his foot off the gas, Jake slowed down to twenty-five miles per hour, eyes straining to see into the murky gray. As the big SUV rolled through, the mist engulfed it and then expanded and rolled away like a living thing.

  Jake swallowed hard, caught somewhere between fear and apprehension. He knew the bridge was somewhere up ahead, though it wouldn’t be obvious until he was right on top of it. What if he missed the turn? He knocked his palm against the steering wheel in frustration, wondering if he should turn around and find another way.

  A gap appeared in the mist.

  Jake sat up straighter in the seat as if the new angle would provide a better view of the road. A gust of wind blew through and caused more gaps, the spectral light churning like something out of a dream. Eventually, Jake could make out the dashed line in the road, realizing he’d drifted out into the center. He corrected himself and increased his speed to thirty.

  Finally, the Explorer broke through the gripping fog, and Jake saw the thin line of a bridge stretching over the Susquehanna River in the distance. Encouraged that his goal was in sight, Jake pressed the gas pedal and sped forward. His eyes flicked to the scraps of garbage drifting across the road beneath the dead lamp posts, and another flash of movement caught his eye.

  A half-dozen people were jogging through the yards on his left, their heads down and attention focused forward, rifles cradled in their arms. Others up ahead ran in the same direction, toward the bridge. Two of them stopped and turned toward Jake, their rifle barrels tracking his driver’s side door. For a moment, Jake thought he was going to be Swiss cheese, so he hit the gas and put some distance between them.

  “Crawlers?” Jake asked himself curiously, but he didn’t think so. They were mostly dressed in military garb, though some wore plain civilian clothes. And he swore he saw American flags stitched into the arms of the military uniforms, and the civilians seemed to have white bands tied around their arms. National Guard? Militia?

  Jake was doing fifty miles per hour, passing several groups of the soldiers and militia people when one of them stopped and waved at him. Jake just shook his head. He wasn’t stopping, especially for a bunch of strangers with guns. If it was the bridge they were after, he’d beat them to it and get across before they could take up positions.

  When his truck began to s
hake with the hammering of bullets, Jake stared at the people in the yard in confusion. He thought it was them firing at him, yet all he saw was their backs as they ran for cover. Jake ducked down and peeked over the dashboard, slamming his foot on the gas pedal. The Explorer jerked forward, and Jake noticed too late that he was heading toward a pair of black vans with loudspeakers fixed on top flanking the road. A dozen or more black-hooded figures converged on him from all sides, spitting fire from the ends of their weapons.

  Crawlers.

  Even above the sound of bullets hammering his vehicle, Jake heard the loudspeakers shouting words in thickly accented English.

  “Put down your weapons,” the voice shouted. “Join the New Block, and you will be shown mercy—”

  A bullet shattered his front windshield, glass washing over him like fat raindrops. Jake lifted his Ruger above the dash and fired blindly while jerking his wheel to the left. He accelerated straight into a line of shadowy figures, jumping the curb and sending shooters scattering in all directions. Yanking the wheel back to the right, Jake straightened the Explorer, zoomed past the crawler vans, and angled toward the bridge.

  Once Jake reached the corner a hundred yards away, he slowed down and glanced up into his rearview mirror, watching as the national guardsmen and crawlers clashed in a wild free-for-all of gunfire and hand-to-hand combat.

  “It’s a war zone out here,” Jake gasped as he sped around the corner in a squeal of tires and then shot across the bridge.

  Heart pounding and brain hyper-focused, Jake followed Cumberland Boulevard until it curved south to meet Highway 11. Then, turning right onto the highway, Jake floored it until he was doing eighty. He held his gun tightly in one hand as cold wind whipped his hair and stung his cheeks. Eyes lifting to the rearview mirror, Jake studied his own face. It was covered in cuts from pieces of lead and glass, and his eyes had a haunted, hunted look.

  He dropped his eyes to the road once more, jaw clenched tight, daring someone to try and stop him as he passed stores and shops and apartment buildings with cold, lightless windows. He didn’t need to worry though, because there were no pedestrians out and just a few traces of taillights disappearing into side streets or parking lots. A vehicle flew past him in the opposite direction, heading back to the river toward the brutal fight, although no one bothered him on his way out of town.