After a momentary pause, Zach replied in a timid tone. “I thought they were gonna attack us.”
“Why her?” asked Harper, dying to know if her suspicion proved true.
“Left end… first target I saw.” Zach sighed. “Sorry. I know I panicked.”
He answered fast enough and didn’t stumble, so she accepted it hadn’t been a racial thing.
“Which one of those four was the biggest threat?” asked Cliff.
“Uhh, they all had guns. Does it matter?”
“Harper?” asked Cliff.
“Is it really a good idea to ask me to answer a question he gave an obviously wrong—or clueless—answer to? He’s already pissed at me.”
“No, no…” muttered Zach. “You were right. I shouldn’t have shot at them. Thanks for stopping me from screwing up even worse. Who would you have shot first if they were a threat?”
“Umm.” She pictured the line of people… then added blue sashes. “Probably the guy with the giant machine gun.”
“Duh,” said Zach. “Yeah, that makes sense. I just saw people with guns.”
“Harper’s not entirely wrong, but her answer isn’t totally correct either.” Cliff smiled.
“Okay, now I’m confused, too.” Annapurna scratched her head, looking back and forth between everyone.
Cliff chuckled. “The correct answer is that there is no single correct answer. Threat evolves. An opponent can go from being no big deal to a huge problem in a split second. What if the smiling guy with the shotgun pointed away from us whipped out a hand grenade? Maybe the dude with the M249 couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with it, but the young woman with the rifle could put bullets up your nose? That’s the damn hard part about combat. You have to recognize potential threats, prioritize them, and act on them all in a second or two. And no, I don’t expect either of you to be able to do that. My point is, you came charging around the van trying to shoot the first target you saw. That’s a good way to get dead. Never just run out into the open. Also, make sure the person you’re about to shoot at actually is an enemy before you fire.”
Zach didn’t say anything.
Ugh. Harper stared down at the carpeted floor, going back and forth over that group of people and trying to figure out how she could’ve possibly evaluated who was the most dangerous in mere seconds. Studying for the SATs didn’t feel like such a horrible task anymore. Nor did having to speak in front of people. She closed her eyes, offering the universe a deal: she’d give a speech in front of her whole high school in only her underwear if the world could go back to normal. Alas, a moment later when she looked, she remained in the back of a van driving among the ruins of Denver.
Rafael followed Route 6 east past Lakewood. Harper looked out the window despite not really wanting to. Fortunately, her old home on Newton Street sat a good distance south, way too far to see. Still, the glimpses she did catch of houses close to the highway hit her like a gut punch. Roofs holed by falling debris, sometimes whole houses flattened as if a giant had stepped on them. Eight in ten buildings had burned to some degree, many to their foundations. Light poles and trees tilted to one side, and cars piled up in clusters everywhere, several even embedded in the sides of houses. The blocks around her house hadn’t looked too bad, but this area left no doubt the apocalypse had occurred.
She cringed, imagining traffic at nearly six in the morning when the blasts happened, people rolling along at sixty, seventy miles an hour, then blinded by a sudden flash, their cars knocked out by the EM pulse or physically hurled off the road when the blast wave rolled by.
It no longer snowed ash at least, though everything still looked like the middle of a grey winter. The van kicked up a cloud in its wake, despite how slow Rafael had to drive to navigate the numerous abandoned and crashed vehicles.
The devastation everywhere made Harper want to run back to the hills more than ever. That remoteness, the lack of damage in Evergreen pushed the reality of the destruction a few steps back. As they drew closer to downtown, the damage pattern changed. North, some parts of Denver looked like never-developed open land. Buildings and homes had been so flattened by an airburst that little evidence remained anything had ever been there. East and south, the damage didn’t reach the same level of totality, but still looked far worse than what had been near her old house.
After a long, depressing fifteen minutes, they weaved among smashed cars and broken high-rises in the Denver downtown. The city resembled a popsicle stick model that someone dropped on the floor and kicked a few times, then dusted with a copious layer of ash. Harper pulled her shirt up over her mouth and nose at the first whiff of burning. The toxic haze she remembered hanging over everything had abated along with the ash-fall, but fires still had to be burning somewhere for it to smell so much like char. Or perhaps that stink had permeated everything so deeply it would take another nuke to get rid of it.
Warped metal girders jutted out from the sides of skyscrapers like the ribs of wounded giants. One building had partially disintegrated to a skeleton of naked steel, the upside-down tail end of a char-blackened jet liner still sticking out from where it had been thrown into the building by the force of the nuclear explosion. Concrete chunks ranging in size from watermelons to small cars littered everywhere.
She braced herself for the sight of bodies hanging from poles or trees like some totemic warning from the Lawless, but mercifully, none of that existed. They passed plenty of bodies, though all had been left where they’d fallen, most well advanced into decay… too far gone to tell men from women.
Eventually, St. Joseph’s hospital appeared on the right, a giant rectangle full of smashed windows, scorched walls, and beige bricks bearing the negative silhouettes of people who’d been vaporized. Less-burned spots where bodies had shielded the wall from the scorching flash formed a ghostly monument to their last split second of life.
“Whoa,” said Zach.
Harper gazed up in awe at the six-story building. The lower two stories had once been almost entirely window. A strip of slats ran across at the level of the third floor like some giant air intake for the world’s biggest central air unit. Above that, smaller, narrow windows had also blown out, along with a ‘jewel’ at the top of the structure where a two-story square of glass formerly stood between a pair of brick-faced towers.
“Go around to the other side,” said Tegan. “Take the next right past the parking garage, then right again on Eighteenth. We should use the emergency entrance. Less walking that way.”
“You got it, Doc,” said Rafael.
“Actually, hang on. Keep going to Franklin. There’s a Walgreens pharmacy.”
He drove onward, passing the first right and pulling around the Walgreens building. That place looked as though war reenactors had used it to recreate Normandy—with live ammo.
“Someone already hit this place,” said Cliff.
“We should look anyway.” Tegan leaned closer to the window. “It’s likely looters would have only taken the drugs they recognized… OxyContin, morphine, Xanax, that stuff. Could be antibiotics and other therapeutic drugs left behind.”
“All right.” Cliff nodded to Rafael. “Let’s check.
Rafael swung the van around and backed it up to the pharmacy entrance.
When it stopped, Harper shuffled over to the back doors and opened them, then jumped down. The initial breath of air stained with the reek of burned plastic and rotting meat nearly doubled her over, heaving. In both directions down the street in front of the Walgreens, decaying bits of body littered the road here and there, some near car wreckage, some jutting out from under large chunks of debris that had fallen on top of people. Much of the human remains had partially burned. The lumps still present had to have been shielded from the nuclear flash.
Oh, God… I’m gonna throw up. She flinched away from the carnage, beyond grateful that her old neighborhood had been far enough from a detonation site to escape such a grisly fate. Madison hadn’t seen gore like this. As l
ong as Harper lived, she’d never forget the sight of half a corpse, disintegrated where the corner of a building hadn’t shielded him at the moment of detonation. Some of his head, his left arm, and left leg had been behind a wall. The rest of him no longer existed.
“Zach, you stay here with me, keep an eye on the van. Anna, Harp, you guys go in with Doc. If you see trouble, back off if possible. If it hits the fan, we’ll be right behind you.”
“Okay,” said Annapurna, taking the lead into the pharmacy.
Harper forced herself not to vomit, eager to get inside. She rushed after Tegan and Annapurna, her sneakers crunching over the garbage left behind from looters tearing open bags of candy and chips. Various things not immediately useful to looters such as adult diapers, paper plates, dish detergent and so on lay scattered everywhere on the floor. No one appeared to be in the place at least, but despite the apparent emptiness, she still kept a tight grip on the Mossberg.
Tegan bee-lined for the back, jumped the counter into the pharmacy area, and raced around shelves. Upon encountering locked cabinets, she took a step back and aimed her Beretta.
“Wait,” said Annapurna. “Shooting them open might attract trouble. Someone hears a gunshot, they’re going to come running.”
“So…” Tegan glanced at her. “Got a better idea?”
“Yeah. Harper, would you please go tell Rafael we need him in here to deal with locks?”
“Sure.”
She jogged outside. Cliff, Rafael, and Zach all stood at the front of the van, watching the street.
“Rafael? They need you in there to open a locked cabinet.”
“Aye, chica. One sec.” He reached into the van to grab a small box from under the driver’s seat, shut the door, and followed her back to the pharmacy counter.
Harper paced in circles, sick to her stomach from worry. A few minutes after Rafael jumped the counter, Tegan called out, asking someone to get a shopping cart.
“A cart’s not gonna make it down these aisles,” said Harper. “There’s too much crap on the floor.”
“Grr. Baskets then.”
Over the next twenty minutes, they ferried handbaskets of fat white bottles to the van. Tegan’s guess proved accurate. Most of the painkillers with recognizable names like Percocet and so on had been taken already, but the looters left behind a good amount of other medications that the average person wouldn’t have the first clue what it did.
Tegan also had them grab bandages, gauze, disinfectant, and various non-pharmaceutical medical supplies that would be good to have on hand. Harper nabbed a couple more bottles of laundry detergent and dish soap just because. Once they had cleared out the Walgreens of meds, they piled back into the van for the short ride to the emergency entrance of St. Joseph’s.
Rafael and Annapurna stayed with the van.
A short distance into the hospital, away from the wind that reached in the smashed windows, the strong stink of death hung in the air, watering Harper’s eyes. Zach clamped a hand over his mouth, shuddered, and fell to his knees, vomiting.
Cliff scrunched up his face. “That’s not a good smell.”
Harper heaved a couple times. She’d been sorta handling the odor, but when Zach started puking, she lost control and painted the wall. Fortunately, it had been a while since her meager breakfast, so she didn’t waste too much food.
Everyone followed Tegan without question, but it soon became obvious she didn’t exactly know where to go. They walked a hallway past some offices and took the stairs to the next floor. The reek worsened, and the reason became evident after a few minutes of hunting around for the hospital’s drug storage area.
Numerous beds held the rotting remains of patients. After making eye contact with a heavyset older guy who’d turned almost completely purple and swelled up with bloat, Harper refused to look through any more doors.
“Guh,” she muttered, near to vomiting again. It took her a moment to gather herself enough that she didn’t think she’d throw up the instant her hand left her mouth. “They just left them to die?”
Tegan pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth. Thus far, she’d managed not to throw up. “My guess is they were critical patients on life support who probably passed away when the power failed. They were already gone before any organized evacuation effort could even start.”
“Or the people running the evacuation triaged lost causes,” muttered Cliff.
Tegan bowed her head. “I suppose anything is possible. People have to make desperate decisions at a time like that.”
A loud slam echoed from the far end of the corridor.
Everyone froze. Harper sidestepped left, taking cover in a doorway. Mercifully, that room had no patient in it. Zach ran across to the opposite side, also taking cover in a doorway. Cliff brought his rifle up and advanced one door in front of Zach. Tegan darted past Harper into the room, completely out of the corridor.
Harper stared over the Mossberg down the hall at the spot from whence the noise emanated. Voices grew louder, men laughing, a woman calling out in a taunting tone, more men laughing. A stairwell door flung outward a short distance in front of where Cliff had taken up a position.
Three guys barged into the hallway, clad in a disparate mix of jeans, polo shirts, khaki’s and T-shirts. Behind them, a thirtyish woman in a denim jacket and camo pants made a mocking cry gesture at someone still in the stairway. All four carried weapons—and all four wore the blue sashes of the Lawless.
The man at the front of their group stopped in mid laugh, staring at Cliff, Zach, and Harper. “Well now. Looks like we got some new friends. Recruits or corpses, you decide.”
“Pass. Heard your benefits plan sucks,” said Cliff. “Get lost or get dead.”
Harper tried to assess them as fast as possible: talker had an Uzi hanging over his shoulder on a strap. The man to his left carried an AK47 in one hand, up, resting on his shoulder, which he started lowering into firing position. The third guy had two handguns in belt holsters, neither out. The woman held an M-16 in a two-handed grip closer to ready than the AK, and she didn’t have the demeanor of a kidnap victim. Shadows moved in the stairwell, hinting that they faced more than four Lawless.
She aimed at the woman with the M-16—who jumped backward into the stairwell the instant she noticed the shotgun pointed at her. Cliff fired at the Lawless with the AK before he could swing it down into a firing position. Two rapid shots hit the man in the chest before one nailed him in the forehead. The man withered to a heap on the ground where he stood. Harper shot Talker in the chest at the same time Zach fired at him. The man clenched down on his Uzi, which barked a rapid burst, spraying the wall between Cliff and Zach with fragments of chipped floor.
Tegan screamed at the eruption of gunfire.
The other Lawless dove to the floor and belly-slid into a room two doors in front of Harper on the same side.
She shifted to cover the stairwell.
Zach aimed back and forth like a woodchuck on cocaine. He twitch fired a few shots at shadows; a scream came from the stairwell that sounded female and a little too young to have come from the woman with the M-16.
“Go!” shouted another man in the stairs.
Cliff aimed at the doorway the man slid into.
Two seconds later, a short, female Lawless in a denim jacket zoomed out of the stairwell in a stumbling run across the hallway. Harper aimed for the girl’s head, but hesitated—the gang punk didn’t look toward any of them, keeping her head down, arms up, stumble-running as if most of her forward momentum came from being shoved. She looked scared shitless. Disregarding her, Harper shifted her aim back to the stairwell the girl had come out of—right as a pudgy bald guy leapt out, raising two giant handguns.
Zach’s .22 went off twice, but whether he hit the girl or not, she couldn’t tell.
Harper blasted the bald guy in the face.
The gang girl disappeared into the same room where the man with the pistols went.
Baldy fired once from
each gun, both painfully loud in the corridor, even louder than her shotgun, but had no time to aim at anyone before receiving a face full of buckshot. His head snapped back. Dead in midair, he collapsed flat on his side in the middle of the hallway, his copious stomach wobbling.
Bastard threw that girl across the hall as a decoy.
“Dave!” shouted the woman in the stairwell. Only her M-16 came around the doorjamb.
Harper retreated into the room, her back to the wall by the door, as the Lawless woman let off a wild, blind barrage. Somewhere under the roar of her weapon, Zach shouted several curses. A man roared in anger; rapid footsteps approached.
The Lawless who’d belly-slid across the hall burst into the room with Harper and Tegan. Being close enough to kiss him with her back pressed to the wall didn’t give her enough room to bring the Mossberg to bear. He pounced on her, grabbing the shotgun in his left hand and pressing it into her chest, pinning her to the wall.
“Come with us, sweetie. This don’t gotta be like that.” He grinned, putting the tip of his pistol to her temple. “Now be a good little pet and let go of my shotgun.”
“Don’t!” shouted Tegan.
“If I was you,” said the Lawless, “I’d drop that gun before I splat Red’s brains all over the wall.”
The snap of a .22 rifle firing four times fast came from the hallway, along with a woman’s gasp of agony… and a loud boom from an AR15 or M16.
As soon as the man shifted his eyes toward Tegan, Harper smacked her left hand up, striking the bottom of the guy’s wrist. His gun went off, hitting the wall a few inches above her head, momentarily deafening her in one ear.
Tegan fired, but missed. Harper rammed her knee into the man’s groin while tightening her grip on his wrist, desperate to keep holding that gun away from her face. He doubled over from the nut shot, eyes rolling back into his skull. Growling, Harper head-butted him in the nose, knocking him back on his ass. Tegan fired again, hitting him in the low chest. He howled in pain. Harper recovered her grip on the Mossberg, stepped on his gun hand, and pumped a 12-gauge shell into his chest at point blank range.
The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2) Page 29
