by Bowman, Dave
What mattered was getting home. What mattered was surviving.
He would do what it took to see her again. That was clear to him.
Don’t worry, Annie. I’ll be there soon.
Keep reading for Book 2!
Get Out Alive
Prologue
Sunday, 4:12 a.m. MST
Jack was running.
He struggled to catch his breath. He fought against the pain in his chest that flared with each inhalation. The cold night air felt like daggers in his lungs. His ribs burned in agony with each rise and fall of his torso.
They were on his trail.
At least four of them. They drove the dark, empty streets searching for him in two vehicles. The engines broke the unnatural silence of the city. The sound in the distance was getting closer. He had to run faster.
It was just before dawn, and a sliver of a moon was low in the sky. The dim moonlight shone on the asphalt. He slowed down for a second as he got to the end of the block. He looked around quickly. He saw no one. He took off running again.
Jack inhaled sharply, causing a fiery sensation to rise in his shoulder and ribs. His head throbbed. His legs propelled him forward, but not without protest in the form of a stabbing pain. He ignored the sharp ache shooting down his hip as he ran.
One vehicle was getting much closer now. The low, rumbling sound of its engine was growing.
It was dark, but this part of the city was empty. If they took a turn toward his position now, he would be spotted.
Hide? Or keep running?
There were some abandoned buildings down the street a ways, off to the left. Businesses, restaurants, chain stores. Most of them had been raided already. The windows had been broken, the doors torn off the hinges. Trampled merchandise littered the entrances.
They looked empty, but were they?
Or was he being watched now? Were some of his enemies – allied with those on his trail now – just waiting to make their move? Were they hiding out of sight behind those smashed windows?
If he took cover inside one of those buildings, he would be trapped. If they found him inside, there would be no escape.
No, he couldn't stop. He had to keep going. He was still too close to their hideout. He needed to put more distance behind him.
Faster!
He urged himself forward as he crossed the wide street. He could hear one of the vehicles, a truck, picking up speed. It sounded close now. Maybe just a street or two away, behind him. They were racing over the ground he had just covered moments before.
He couldn't make it another block. They would spot him out there, and shoot him on sight. He had to take cover. Now.
Across the large parking lot he approached, a shopping center stretched out before him. A row of businesses, facing toward the street.
But it was too far. He'd never make it. The truck was so close now. Any second, they'd round the corner and shoot him. An image flashed in his mind: his body lying in the parking lot, bleeding out on the pavement.
Then it would all be over.
He'd never make it home to his wife. Never see Annie again. And she needed him. He knew it. If they shot him dead, how would she survive in this deadly new world without him?
He heard voices shouting from one street behind him. The truck engine revved again.
It was his only chance.
He took a quick breath, then bolted out across the open stretch. The moonlight shone on his lone figure running at full speed across the empty, exposed parking lot.
One street over, headlights illuminated the road. The truck picked up speed as it approached its next turn.
The bass sound of the engine cut through the night. It echoed in his mind, each moment stronger. The truck's low drone charged ahead. He braced himself, waiting to feel the burst of light from the truck's headlights fall on his back.
Almost there . . .
1
Thirty-three hours earlier - Friday, 6:37 p.m. PST, East L.A.
Jack's eyes flew open.
Something was moving in the house.
The sudden noise woke him quickly from his restless sleep. His heart pounded in his chest as he listened.
Another noise, coming from somewhere within the house.
He looked over in the corner where Brent and Naomi had been sleeping before he dozed off. Blinking his heavy eyes through the sleepiness, he saw their shapes lying on the floor. They were still asleep.
Footsteps moved faintly down the hallway, getting closer.
Someone was there.
Not again.
The intruder's shoes scuffed the linoleum outside the door, just a few feet from Jack. The doorknob turned slowly.
Jack's hand moved to the pistol at his side as the adrenaline coursed through his veins. He braced himself for what was coming.
He knew what he had to do. Again.
A voice – the intruder was speaking to him. Was it Frank? No, it couldn't possibly be. He was dead. Jack had killed him.
Was it another squatter come to steal their food?
He clutched the pistol and swung it around toward the door.
But in his daze, something made Jack freeze before he flicked the safety off.
The voice. It was familiar.
“Whoa, slow down, Jack. It's just me.”
Jack squinted groggily in the direction of the voice. There was just enough light in the room to make out the tall, lanky shape of Brent standing in the doorway. His hands were raised defensively, his eyes wide as he stared, stunned, at Jack.
Jack set the pistol down and exhaled.
“Sorry about that, Brent,” he spoke as he pushed himself up off the filthy floor and leaned his back against the wall.
He rubbed his eyes and looked toward the corner again, where he thought he had seen two figures sleeping. But now, he could see that it was only Naomi, who slept in the corner with her back to them.
He had come close to shooting Brent. Too close.
Jack shook his head. Keep it together, Hawthorne.
Brent closed the door quietly behind him and sighed.
“It's a good thing I already went to the bathroom,” he muttered under his breath as he walked across the room and settled back in his usual spot on the floor. “This is the only pair of pants I have.”
If Jack hadn't been so tense, he might have laughed at the joke.
Of course, there was no working bathroom in the house. Not really, anyway. Jack, Naomi, and Brent had been making do with what was left of the facilities in the abandoned house. Needless to say, it was a far cry from the tidy master bathroom he shared with his wife, Annie, back at their house in Texas.
But then, nothing was like it used to be.
Everything had changed just two days ago. Jack's mind reeled from the events of the past forty-eight hours.
He and Brent had been in Los Angeles for a work conference when an EMP – an electromagnetic pulse – had destroyed the electrical grid. And that was when things got really bad.
Jack's face was still sore from the fight with the guy who had attacked Naomi on the interstate. And everything that came after that? It was still a blur.
The dead people in the convenience store, the panic on the streets, finding Naomi's mother murdered, and the nuclear attack that had leveled the city.
They had been walking east, trying to escape the city, when the massive bomb was detonated miles away in the downtown area. Then, they had begun a frenzied search for shelter. Jack knew they had only minutes before nuclear fallout would begin to shower down on them.
The three of them had been lucky to find the house with the boarded-up windows they were now hiding in. It was clearly a drug den used by addicts and squatters before the EMP. But it had saved them from being exposed to deadly radiation.
They had spent the past two nights and two days hunkered down in an empty bedroom hiding from the radioactive fallout caused by the nuclear bomb.
It had been the worst forty-eight hours Jack cou
ld have ever imagined. And worst of all, his wife and home were four states away.
Brent leaned his head back against the wall and looked over at Jack.
“Are you sure you're all right, man?” Brent asked, keeping his voice down so he wouldn't wake Naomi. “You seem really jumpy. And I'm kind of afraid of getting shot the next time I move.”
Jack didn't meet his eyes as he glanced down at his pistol. “Don't worry, Brent. I wasn't going to shoot you.”
Brent shifted in his seat. “That's not very reassuring, to be honest. You keep pulling that gun on me every time I move a muscle.”
“The safety was on,” Jack offered.
Brent shot him a doubtful look.
Jack shrugged. “Well, what do you expect? We had two people come in here and pull guns on us. I have to be alert.”
“Yeah, but it's my watch shift right now,” Brent answered. “I'm on the lookout for the bad guys until it gets dark, remember?”
Jack remembered.
It was Brent's turn to be on watch. But Jack just couldn't let his guard down. Not after what had happened since Wednesday.
“I mean, you showed me how to use this gun,” Brent said, glancing down at the pistol he had pulled from his waistband and carefully rested on the floor beside him. “I could shoot it if a bad guy comes at us. And maybe I would get lucky and actually hit him.”
Jack glanced over at Brent to see the younger man grin at him.
“It's another joke,” Brent said. “You do still remember how to laugh, right?”
Jack offered a half smile to satisfy Brent. But the truth was, he wasn't in a laughing mood.
He had taught Brent and Naomi the basics of how to handle a gun. But they couldn't exactly have target practice in such an enclosed space, so Brent and Naomi had still never used a firearm. And that fact had kept Jack awake even when it was his turn to sleep. He was on edge, always on high alert for another attack.
The tension was starting to get to him. It was true. But he wasn't going to crack up. He wasn't going to fall under the pressure and make a deadly mistake. Any error, any slip-up, could be lethal. And at the very least, it would delay them. And he didn't have time to waste. He had to get back to Annie.
Jack felt the knot in his stomach tighten at the thought of how much time he had lost already. It had been over forty-eight hours since he had heard his wife's voice, since he had tried to warn her to leave Austin. He'd had a hunch about the impending attacks. He had tried to tell her to leave the city.
The words he had spoken to her on the phone echoed in his mind.
Get out, Annie! Leave Austin and get to the ranch in Loretta.
But Jack didn't know how much Annie had heard. The phone connection had been lost while he was speaking.
Had she heard his warning? Had she left Austin in time? Or had the worst happened? Had she been trapped downtown when Austin was attacked?
He shook his head, trying to force the thoughts out of his mind. That couldn't happen. Annie must have escaped. She had to.
His only hope was that his wife had heard him tell her to leave the city before the call had ended. He imagined her now, safe and sound at his family's old ranch in the small town in central Texas. Surely she had heard him on the phone. Surely she had left Austin in time. She was probably there now, waiting for him to get there.
He vowed to himself, yet again, that he would make it to Texas alive.
Jack stretched his long legs out on the floor in front of him and looked around the room. Besides the three of them and their few belongings, the space was mostly empty. When they had first arrived, there had been some needles and other drug paraphernalia, along with quite a bit of garbage, scattered over the floor. They had swept the debris into the corner two days ago.
Jack's eyes fell on the floor. A dark red smear of blood stained the center of the linoleum floor, a gruesome reminder of his encounter with Frank, Naomi's stepfather, who had followed them there. Jack and Brent had dragged the body to the other bedroom. There, it rested beside the guy who had almost shot Naomi and Brent.
Two bodies, rotting in the next room. And more and more, he could smell them.
Jack shuddered, sick with the knowledge that he had killed. Twice.
The features of the room were losing their sharpness as the light faded. Soon, darkness would overtake the house.
Jack yawned and stretched his neck, careful to avoid any sudden movements that would cause pain to flare across his shoulders or face.
The nights were the hardest. The air in the room became stifling as Jack sat up through the long, endless hours. He would listen intently, his fingers touching the cold metal of the gun at the slightest stirring of a rodent outside.
Naomi's guard shift officially began just before sunrise, but that day Jack had let her sleep late. She had woken up when the sunlight filtering through the crack at the bottom of the door was strong. She saw that Jack had stayed awake, and she had felt guilty. But Jack didn't complain. He wasn't getting much sleep even when he tried. And besides, when push came to shove, he wasn't sure that he could trust Naomi or Brent to handle a rough situation on their own.
Naomi had returned to sleep when it was Brent's turn to guard the place. Jack looked over at her again. She was still, with her dark hair splayed out across her back. Jack noticed that she was sleeping a lot. And when she was awake, she seemed different than that first day. Like she wasn't all there.
Jack chalked up the change in her personality to shock. She had found her mother lying dead in the apartment the two of them had shared in LA. It wasn't something that a person could get over in a couple days, if ever. And anyway, the stress of the past two days had taken its toll on all of them.
So Jack didn't mind staying on guard duty. He couldn't sleep much anyway, and when he could, he was haunted by horrific images of the sights, sounds, and smell on the streets after the EMP.
And even worse, he was haunted by what he feared was waiting for them when they left that room. Outside.
The light in the shabby room was getting dimmer. The long day was coming to an end. Jack imagined the sky outside becoming red and orange as the sun set.
The nuclear attack had happened right around that time, just two days before. It had been forty-eight hours since the terrifying mushroom cloud had risen above LA.
They had waited in that room for two excruciating days for the risk of radiation exposure to pass. Or at least to decrease. He knew that there would still be a risk of radiation poisoning for several days, but the risk had fallen dramatically since the bomb's detonation two days before.
Now that the danger of exposure had decreased, Jack felt the urge to venture outside. Staying in the house brought its own dangers. They had already been attacked in that room twice, and it was only a matter of time before it would happen again.
And Jack was starting to worry that those four dreary walls were getting to him. He had come too close to making a terrible mistake when Brent was at the door.
It was time to face what lay beyond that little room.
He glanced over at Brent, who was still leaned against the wall.
“Get your things together, Brent,” Jack said. “And wake Naomi up.”
Brent glanced at Jack with a questioning look on his face.
“It's time to leave,” Jack said.
2
Time unknown - Somewhere in East Texas
The tall man walked with a limp. His shirt was torn in several places. Dried blood was caked around his face and arms. His clothes were filthy, smeared with blood and dirt and who knew what else. Scratches covered his face and hands. His dark brown hair was wild. His eyes stared, empty, at the horizon as he walked.
A few dozen feet away, Ricky suddenly stopped counting the pills in the plastic bag. He stood up.
“Hey, do you hear that?” he asked his buddy Lance.
Ricky craned his neck to look around the stand of pine trees in front of them.
Lance rolled his eyes.
“Man, you're always freaking out about something. Give me the stuff and I'll count it 'cause you're too paranoid.” He reached out from where he lay on the forest floor.
Ricky pocketed the small bag of bright blue pills, ignoring Lance. “No, listen,” he whispered. “There's someone coming.”
“It's probably just a rabbit or something,” Lance said. “Nobody's out here but us. Gimme the stuff, dude.”
Ricky reached for the gun he had set on the log nearby and stood still, listening.
Lance started laughing at his friend.
“What, are you afraid of a little bunny? A fluffy, little bunny rabbit?” Lance teased, then broke out in guffaws.
Lance stopped mid-laugh. His eyes went round. He sprang to his feet, or at least he tried to. He wasn't in the best shape.
Ricky raised his pistol, his hand shaking.
The two of them watched as the tall man stumbled through the forest. By the time Lance had grabbed his own gun, the strange man was just fifty feet away.
“Hey, stop right there!” Ricky shouted, training his gun on the intruder.
But the tall man kept walking. He didn't even seem to notice them.
“I said stop!” Ricky repeated, his hand trembling from fright. “I will shoot you!”
But the crazed man kept walking forward slowly, without even looking at them.
“Hey,” Lance said to Ricky under his breath. “This dude's crazy. Look at him.”
Ricky looked at him more closely. The guy did seem pretty weird, the way he kept walking like he couldn't even see or hear them. But the man was also big and tall, and Ricky didn't want him getting any closer.
“Stop, dude!” Ricky yelled in frustration. “Do you understand English?”
Finally, the man's eyes moved toward the two young men. He slowly understood, and he finally came to a stop. The three of them stood frozen, staring at each other.
But then he started walking again. His hands moved up, slowly.
