by Mike Kraus
Sam looked up at Rachel and whined again, breaking her from her reverie. “Food, right, sorry boy.” Rachel dug into her backpack and pulled out a can of ravioli, opened it and balanced it on top of the fire, in the center where it was the hottest. “I don’t feel like a cold meal tonight, if you can stand to wait a bit.” Sam put his head back down on her leg and watched the slowly warming can in the fire. Rachel joined him and they both stared at the flames, each lost in their own separate worlds.
By the next morning, Rachel and Sam were doing much better. Sam’s cough had dissipated and the winds had finally turned to the south, keeping much of the ash and smoke away from them. As Rachel and Sam left the office building and headed north, she broke an energy bar in half, giving half to Sam and absentmindedly chewing on the other half herself.
According to her map, there were two options for heading north. The first was to continue along the highway, through Greensboro and Durham up into Richmond. The other was to head to the northeast and link up with the railroad that ran up and down the eastern seaboard. From what Rachel could tell, there was a rail station about twenty-five miles from they were, which they would definitely be able to reach by sundown. While the railroad did pass through a few towns on the way up to Richmond, it was primarily a freight line, and it was far enough away from most cities that she figured it wouldn’t have suffered nearly as much damage as the highway.
“What do you think, boy? We can keep going through this mess or try for an easier walk along the rails.” Sam looked up at her and whined, happy to go with Rachel no matter which path she chose. Rachel sighed. “We do have enough food and water to make it there without resupplying, and I’m tired of trying to get through this wreckage. The railroad it is.”
With a final check of the map, Rachel steered them towards a side road that went to the northeast of Charlotte, linking up with a main road that connected to the railroad. As long as the roads are clear, we’ll definitely get there by tonight, and we can take a straight shot up into Richmond to find the cache that Waters and Roche were so eager to reach.
Leonard McComb
10:10 AM, March 29, 2038
The smell of smoke was fresh in the air as Leonard drove down the parkway. After waking up, he worked for an hour to get the Jeep freed from the wreckage surrounding it. Once he was able to pull out into the grass, he started on his way south, switching back and forth from driving on the highway to driving offroad, depending on the road conditions.
So far, the damage to the area had been severe, and it forced him off the highway and into the median or the surrounding areas on several occasions. More than once, though, he had been forced to turn around, making his way back to an exit and taking back roads to get around large craters or debris fields that blocked his path.
While Leonard didn’t have a map of the area, enough road signs were left intact or lying on the side of the road that he was able to figure out where to go. His plan was to continue south until he hit Atlantic City, then make his way west towards Baltimore. From there, he would continue down through Washington and Richmond and then head straight down the coast to South Carolina. While the slow pace of the day had dampened his spirits slightly, Leonard was still in a good mood and continued to make forward progress.
By the evening, Leonard reached the Delaware Memorial Bridge. In the light of the bright beams of the Jeep, Leonard could see that the bridge had survived the nearby blasts with only minimal damage, and it appeared safe to cross. He decided to spend the night on the Jersey side, and get started the next morning, since he didn’t want to risk crossing in the dark.
The next morning, Leonard made a quick detour before continuing across the bridge. With his Jeep running low on gas, he drove around until he found a small neighborhood nearby. After the third house, he finally found one with a garden hose that was wrapped up on the side of the house. He detached the hose from the water supply and cut a short length of it, roughly eight feet long.
Back on the highway, Leonard stopped next to an enormous SUV that was dead in the center of the road. It was still upright and looked intact aside from a broken windshield. He leaned inside the driver’s side door and popped open the gas cover, then began to siphon gas from the car into his Jeep. Once the Jeep was filled, he continued back to the bridge and started to make his way across.
The bridge was indeed intact, like he had seen the night before. Pieces of the supports overhead were broken off or dangling down over it, and there were plenty of vehicles that had crashed both on the bridge and through the side rails, plummeting into the river below. Leonard kept his eyes forward, occasionally revving the engine as he had to drive over large pieces of steel that had fallen and were blocking the road. Twenty minutes later, though, he was across, safely on the other side.
Driving through Wilmington and Newark, Leonard was reminded of the destructive power of the weapons that were unleashed. Every major city he passed through had been destroyed in the same manner, with patterned rings of destruction stretching miles out in every direction from the center. What the nuclear bombs didn’t vaporize, they shredded – everything from paper and plastic to steel and titanium. By the time he reached Baltimore, Leonard had lost track of how many times he had been grateful for the fact that he was driving in an off-road vehicle with 4-wheel drive.
From the looks of it, Baltimore had been hit harder than most cities. While Wilmington, Newark and other places had been severely damaged, Baltimore looked like New York on the scale of destruction. The four lane highway was jammed full of cars, most of them just shells, having burnt up in the initial blast. Leonard was forced off the road again, having to drive through the median and across fields and through parking lots in shopping malls just to get closer in to the city.
By nightfall, Leonard had made it into the heart of the city. He was exhausted from the day’s drive and decided to call it a night. He had hoped to make it through the city in one day, but now he figured he would be lucky if he could make it through the rest of the city the next day. In the middle of a parking lot at a high-end mall in the heart of Baltimore, Leonard found a small group of cars that had miraculously survived the blast, most likely due to the shelter provided by a partially collapsed parking garage nearby. Leonard parked near the cars and made himself comfortable in the Jeep, quickly falling asleep.
Nancy Sims
1:10 PM, March 31, 2038
The basement where Nancy and James were trapped was cold and moist and it smelled heavily of mildew, dirt and unwashed bodies. It was mostly dark, with small pinpoints of light leaking through what Nancy assumed to be the ground floor above her. A light was still in her face, and her vision was filled with Joshua’s grin as he held her ropes, bringing his knife closer to her face.
A clatter came from above, somewhere in the distance, and both brothers froze, looking upwards and then back at each other. Richard licked his lips nervously, still crouched behind his brother, waiting in expectation for an instruction that was quick to come.
Joshua hissed. “Get up there now!”
Obeying, Richard immediately darted up the stairs, mumbling incoherently to himself as he went. Joshua sighed deeply and sheathed his knife, a look of disappointment etched on his face. “So sorry to leave you hanging, little missy, but we’ve got some new sheep coming in, from the sound of it.” With a wistful look back at Nancy, Joshua ascended the stairs after his brother.
Nancy breathed a heavy sigh of relief after the two disappeared, struggling to hold back her tears. James spoke softly to her from across the room. “Are you okay?”
Nancy closed her eyes and nodded, still in shock from how close she had come to whatever vile plan Joshua had in store for her. James spoke again, determination at the edge of his voice. “We’ll get out of this. I don’t know how, but we have to.” Nancy didn’t respond and they both lapsed into silence, feeling the hours drag on, wondering what the two criminals were doing and where they had gone.
With a sudden burst of
activity, the door at the top of the stairs was flung open and a muffled scream came as the two brothers dragged another person down to the basement. Nancy and James both squinted, struggling to adjust their eyes to the sudden light. The figure that the brothers dragged behind them was a woman, short, thin and shapely, with her head covered in a burlap sack. She wore a business outfit, with a blouse and knee-length skirt. Her feet were bare and dirty, presumably from walking for a long distance without shoes.
A few steps from the bottom of the stairs, they hurled the woman to the floor, her head smacking into a support beam at the base of the staircase. The woman’s body went limp and her screams stopped, and Nancy and James looked at each other nervously. Joshua motioned at his brother. “Well go on, get her strung up!” Richard cowered from his brother in response to the gesture and scurried over next to James, rigging a thick length of rope from the ceiling supports.
Within a few minutes, the woman was strung up along with James and Nancy. Joshua walked over to the woman and pulled the sack off of her head, putting his ear next to her nose. “Good. She’s still alive. It’d be a shame to lose one as nice as this.”
He turned to face Nancy, neatly folding the sack up as he spoke. “My apologies to you, little missy, but it looks like you’ll have to wait your turn. No offense intended, of course. We’ll get to you soon enough.” Joshua gave Nancy a cold, wide smile, baring his white teeth at her again, then turned and walked up the stairs.
“Let’s go, Richard!”
Richard turned from where he had been watching the new captive and ran after his brother, still giggling and mumbling to himself the whole way. A few seconds later the door at the top of the stairs closed and they were once again enveloped in silence and darkness.
Marcus Warden
5:15 AM, March 30, 2038
Marcus groaned as he climbed down from his perch. His shoulder was aching from where he had thrust himself against the creature, making it difficult to climb both up and down to retrieve his backpack. His brief struggle with the creature had left him energized instead of tired due to the adrenaline pumping through his veins. He was in no mood to rest; he only wanted to get out of the cavern and back on the move again.
He glanced down at the creature’s remains as he walked by, passing the beam of the flashlight over the corpse. Even with the damage done to the body by the removal of the silvery metallic structure, there was no mistake: it was definitely human. Altered and changed somehow, yes, but still unmistakably human. Marcus shook his head as he stared at the face of the creature. Though it resembled a deflated balloon more than a man, he still felt sympathy. What happened to you, you poor bastard?
The cold night air surrounded Marcus as he exited the cavern, momentarily taking his breath away. After the events of the night, Marcus felt like he was waking up from a dream. If it wasn’t for his aching shoulder and slightly bent and chipped machete, he wouldn’t have believed that any of what had happened was real.
Marcus slowly began to walk up the trail, his gaze vacant as he stared at the night sky and the dark trees around him. Marcus was not a violent man in any sense of the word. Even so, growing up he – like many others – imagined what it would be like if he were face to face with someone who was trying to kill him. His imaginings grew more mature as he grew older. His first thoughts were that he would use an incredible set of self-defense and martial arts skills to tear the person apart. A few years later, it would be guns that he would use. Then, in his college years, he briefly imagined that he would converse with the person rationally, convincing them to choose the moral high ground instead of resorting to violence.
These imaginings, as deranged, delightful and distracting as they had been, were nothing compared to reality. Every time Marcus closed his eyes, he could still feel the imperfections in the grip of the machete as his hands tightened around it, preparing to lunge at the creature. His legs tightened involuntarily with each step. Worst of all, he could still see the smile on the creature’s face, with the silver smoke curling out from its mouth.
Every time Marcus began to feel guilty, picturing the face of the creature after he had killed it, he remembered two simple facts. It wasn’t human. And it was trying to kill me. Memories of his dreams the night before came back, too, mixing with the events of the night. The creature in the dreams was, after all, the same creature that he had seen and killed in the cavern, right down to the last detail. The face, body and limbs were all the same. Of course, he had glimpsed it running through the field and again on the mountain, but to see it up close and in person was completely different. How or why I dreamed that thing up, I don’t know… maybe I got a better view of it through the binoculars than I remembered.
Marcus snapped out of his musings at the loud call of an owl from a nearby tree. The long cry of the creature sent a shiver up his spine and he hastened his climb. Of all the animals in the world, Marcus disliked owls the most. Something about them had terrified him as a child, and he never felt completely comfortable around them as an adult, either. Leaves and branches strewn on the trail snapped and crackled underfoot as Marcus jogged ahead. Dim shadows from his flashlight bounced on the trail as the owl sounded again in the distance.
Rachel Walsh
6:11 AM, April 1, 2038
After a few miles of walking, Rachel was relieved to find that the road became passable and intact. She and Sam had no trouble picking up their pace to reach the nearby rail station. Though a North/South rail line had been in place in the area from decades ago, this one that she was planning on following was more recent. It was put in place in the early 2020’s in response to the severe infrastructure problems that the country faced. As part of a congressional mandate, both freight and high-speed passenger rails were installed along the Eastern and Western Coasts, with two main arteries connecting them through the center of the country, with one along the Southern Coast and one passing through the Midwest.
Once the infrastructure was in place, companies of every facet jumped at the opportunity to use them and a rail revival of sorts took place. It grew to be so large, in fact, that many airlines petitioned congress and state legislatures to increase fees and taxes on the rails due to how many passengers and cargo were traveling by rail instead of air. Fortunately for the airlines, though, the revival of the rail only lasted a few years as passengers grew tired of the increasing lines and cramped quarters associated with rail travel. High-speed rails could get you from Washington to Miami in two hours, and so many people took advantage of the rails that they began to overwhelm them. This critical oversight in the expected demand came as a shock to the rail companies, who began to raise ticket prices in response. Through a combination of poor planning and greed, though, these price jumps ended up being too much for the fledging sector, which began to die off almost as quickly as it had grown in the first place.
In the end, by the late 2020’s and early 2030’s, passenger rail travel was back to the levels it had seen in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The only saving grace for the rail companies were the freight lines. These managed to stay afloat and make enough money that the rail companies didn’t go out of business. Thousands of trains crossed the country, carrying raw materials from seaboard to seaboard at a miniscule fraction of the cost of air or road travel. Some experiments were done in combining high speed rail travel with freight loads in an effort to generate money from the high-speed rails that were built, but this experiment was quickly put to rest after the first train nearly exploded due to improper handling. Hauling hazardous chemicals at 400-600 MPH wasn’t, in hindsight, the best idea that the rail companies ever had.
Rachel had no expectations of finding any working trains at the rails. Even if she did find one, she had no idea how to operate one. The only thing she wanted the rails for was to increase her travel speed on foot. A combination of private and public dollars had poured into the upkeep and maintenance of the rails, unlike the highways and interstates, which depended solely on public funds. Thi
s, combined with the relative newness of the railroads meant that the rails were better maintained and more structurally sound than even the best highway or interstate in the country. Thus, they would – hopefully – be easier to follow, since there was a better chance of them being intact, even on the few occasions that they passed through large cities.
After several hours of walking, Rachel was about to find out if this assumption was correct or not. Off in the distance, past a stand of trees, Rachel could see the telltale sign of the railroad. A red-roofed building sat next to a line of telephone poles that stretched off into the distance to the north and the south. A large swath of trees had been cleared from around the track, leaving a gap that could be spotted from miles away. Rachel smiled as she drew closer. The rail station looked completely intact, with the glazed windows unbroken and all of the shingles still on the roof.
As Rachel stepped out from the grass and gravel onto the thick wood and steel of the railroad track, she grinned. As she had hoped and suspected, the rail was completely intact for as far as the eye could see. Even towards the south, where there was more damage to the area near Charlotte, the track still looked to be in perfect condition. There was no guarantee that it would be this good farther north, but the condition of the track combined with the complete lack of obstacles and debris meant that she and Sam could easily increase their speed, cutting their travel time to Richmond down by as much as a few days. Even when they reached the more damaged areas, Rachel figured that it would still be easier on the tracks than on the road. Less debris to kick up, the rails are sturdier than the roads and even the trees are cut back so far from the line that they shouldn’t be much of an issue, either.
