The Barbarous Road_A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  The more I think about it, the more I’m not sure how he’s that good of a shot. He’s almost not human. Then again, there’s a competence about the man that’s crystal clear. He may not be a good person, but he’s a damn good shot, and he doesn’t hurt animals.

  Taking up the group’s six, I’m thinking about Marcus and wondering if maybe he’s becoming this larger than life thing to me. One can say a lot of things about this bearded hulk, but they can’t say he’s anything but a man’s man. I mean, good Lord, in this world of survival and war, the guy makes me feel small, untried and naïve. Then again, I’m thinking as we run down the sidewalks and safely onto the docks (for now), I survived the conference center and the collapsing hotel, and I rescued Bailey from the peach eating mental patient, so perhaps I’m not as untested or as small as I’m thinking.

  “Which boat?” Marcus calls out over his shoulder.

  Amber points down the dock, then draws her hand back in horror. She pulls Abigail to a stop, dragging the girl in close to her. The horizon is a swarm of drones. They’re spreading out, heading right for us.

  I can’t speak to the rest of the group, but I see my life flash before me. It happens in an instant. Then the fear takes hold, digs its fingers in me.

  “Run!” I scream as half a dozen medium-sized nightmares shoot by.

  Marcus sprints to the nearest yacht, uses the butt of the rifle to smash in the door, then hustles everyone down into hull of the boat. Bailey looks at me with sheer terror in her eyes. I know what she’s thinking. It’s the same thing I’m thinking. Down here we have the tiniest chance of surviving gunfire, but there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell we’ll survive a direct hit from a missile.

  Sweat is now leaking down our backs and faces.

  It’s stuffy in here. Hot as hell.

  Bailey has Corrine pulled in tight against her; Amber has Abigail pulled in a protective, dying embrace as well. I look at Marcus. He looks back at me. Without an ounce of emotion, he draws a deep breath, then slowly lets it out. He’s got that look on his face that says whatever’s next we’re going to have to deal with. Even if what we’re up against is our own deaths.

  The next sounds startle the bejesus out of all of us. An explosively violent trail of gunfire tears through the front of the hull blowing sheets and bedding and down pillows apart. Water floods in through the holes in the floor and what I assume is a second drone hits us with another brutal salvo. Everyone is screaming and scampering backwards as the boat takes on water.

  “Get to the back!” Marcus screams, but then the boat next to us explodes blowing a hole in the side of our boat. We’re all tucking down, turning our backs to the attack, taking fiberglass shrapnel. A dozen cuts open up on my back. By the sounds of screaming, everyone else has been hit, too. Another hit rips off the front of the boat, a missile exploding underwater in a furious jolt. The yacht jerks sideways from the blast, shoving us off balance. Only Marcus remains standing as the front of the boat settles forward then pitches forward into the harbor.

  Spinning around, sliding downward toward the sea, I see that the entire front of the boat is just gone. Water is flooding forward as the bay not only accepts us but starts to swallow us.

  “Get ready to swim!” Marcus shouts and he drops to a knee, riding the boat into the water. I scramble for Bailey who’s got a grip on Corrine once more. Marcus grabs Amber and Abigail. All of us are bleeding and holding on to whatever’s nearby. All we have left is each other and our senses.

  The boat makes a final dive forward and that’s when we go into the wall of rushing water. The last thing I see before going under is both Bailey and Corrine taking deep, horrified breaths.

  Chapter Twelve

  Miles walked Ben up the small section of Site R’s inner roadway to a small parking garage. He shot off a lock, rolled up the metal door. Sitting before Ben was an incredible piece of work so beautiful it gave him pause.

  “Nice car,” Ben finally said, a low ache starting to form in his stomach. It was either from drinking too much water too fast, or from eating too much food with the same kind of reckless abandon.

  “1970 Chevy Chevelle SS 396.”

  The classic hardtop coupe was custom painted a soft metallic royal blue with two thick, white stripes running from grille to gutter.

  “This is someone’s pride and joy,” Ben muttered.

  “That someone is now dead,” Miles said, dangling a single silver key. Ben just looked at him, shaking his head. “I’m just joking.”

  “I’m not really finding anything funny these days,” Ben said.

  “Hey man, if you can’t joke about the end of the world, honestly, you’re not going to be able to handle it.”

  “My wife and kids are dead, Miles,” Ben said. “Where’s the punchline there?”

  “A lot of people are dead.”

  “Sadistic prick,” Ben grumbled under his breath as he looked the car over.

  Miles opened the driver’s side door, slid in, then reached over and unlocked Ben’s side. He wasn’t one for classic cars, but someone pampered the hell out of this thing. As he strolled around the back of the car, Ben trailed his fingertips over the paint and if felt smooth, freshly waxed and not a single scratch or chip. Even the rubber on the tires looked fitting for the year. Goodyear Polyglas.

  Interesting…

  The SS badging was everywhere, the glass was clean—Miles started the engine—and the motor sounded hungry. No, it sounded ravenous. Miles gave it some gas and the exhaust tinged the air with a rich fuel mixture that reminded him of the old days and his dad’s Pontiac Firebird. Now that was a car!

  He opened the door, slid onto the hard leather seats, looked at the antiquated dash and gauges, the SS branded steering wheel, the automatic transmission which looked less like a stick shift and more like the throttle on a boat.

  “I’d like to meet the owner of this thing,” Ben heard himself saying in a rare moment of him letting his guard down.

  “You’re sitting with him,” Miles grinned.

  Ben frowned, his guard right back up. “Well then, I take that back.”

  “Don’t be a bitch, Ben. We’re in the catbird seat. That’s got to mean something, man.”

  Ben was right handed, but his left hand was still pretty brutal in the day. He snapped a jab at Miles, caught him on the hinge of his jaw, rocked his head sideways. He didn’t have the energy to finish and his stomach was really aching now, like he’d swallowed a stone and now it was just sitting there, spreading the kind of deep pain that hurts you in your shins.

  Shaking it off, even chuckling a little, Miles slid the car into REVERSE then looked over his shoulder as they backed out of the garage and into what was designated as Site R’s Inner Roadway.

  “Back in the day,” Miles said, not really humbled, but lacking in the recent psychopathic charm, “my little sister used to hit harder than that.”

  “Your little sister is more of a man than you are,” Ben commented, having met the woman once a few years back.

  “True.”

  “How much horsepower does this thing have?” he asked as he listened to the big motor rumble.

  “Three hundred and fifty under the hood. I tried to find the LS6 when I started looking for something that was both old and had mammoth sized balls. The LS6 had the 454, but there were only like forty-five hundred of them made. Not even that. I found this gorgeous looking one that was certified ninety-five point three percent original, but the guy wanted almost a hundred grand for it. Damn capitalists.”

  “Nothing wrong with capitalism.”

  “Don’t get me started, Ben,” he said as they drove through the opened blast doors on the way to the exits of what Ben thought were the C and D portals.

  When they left by the C portal and hit the open road, Miles juiced it, eating up the roadway where he could.

  “Why are the cars still moving?” Ben asked.

  “You put in the code, but that code has a timer on it. Gives us tim
e to warn our friends and family, or get to safer ground.”

  “This isn’t safe ground,” Ben said. Then: “Are we even going to see this thing?”

  “Not sure. It’s supposed to detonate a few hundred miles up, but it won’t be directly over us.”

  He thought about it for a moment, knew his brain was still struggling to get back online after the last few days. He felt like it was working at about three-quarters its normal capacity.

  “How far up is the atmosphere?” Ben asked.

  “There’s no real end. It just kind of bleeds out into space,” he said, looking at him funny. “What do you want, Ben, a science lesson?”

  “You said they’d detonate a few hundred miles above the surface.”

  “Yeah, about two hundred and fifty, maybe three hundred miles. That way we get enough spread to cover the US. They could detonate higher into the atmosphere as well, depending on how involved The Silver Queen is with this thing.”

  “I thought she didn’t know about the EMP originally. That it was off the grid, so to speak.”

  He looked at Ben and said, “There is nothing she doesn’t know. I didn’t have to tell her anything.”

  “She could have done this whenever she wanted,” Ben said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “So now she’s going to control the EMP, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why doesn’t she go higher and hit more of the world?” Ben asked, knowing the question made him sound stupid, but he didn’t care, not with the condition he was in both physically and mentally.

  The way Miles was driving threatened to completely unseat him. It was like something out of a video game. Ben really had nothing to hang on to as they swerved through light traffic, honking as they went. He slid on his lap belt, placed hands on both the door and the ceiling for support. At least Miles seemed to be enjoying himself.

  Damn psycho head case.

  “I think the ionosphere starts at about fifty miles up and goes on for like four hundred miles,” Miles said. “Beyond that is the exosphere. Up there, it’s too high. Not right, I guess. Something about atmospheric pressure or temperature or something.”

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked, scanning the road ahead for signs of his own death.

  They were blowing by cars too fast, passing on the shoulders (and nearly getting sideways once), earning a few middle fingers, more than a few retaliatory honks and one guy who tried to scare them by swerving into them. Miles took it all in stride, almost like nothing he did would have any consequences. Perhaps he was right. Maybe the only consequence that mattered to the man was certain death of which this was not.

  “Temperature is too low, gas atoms are spaced too widely. Whatever. I don’t know about all this geothermal mumbo jumbo, Ben. It’s just going off where it’s supposed to.”

  They followed Monterey Lane through a series of S curves, the tires squealing only slightly as they flew down the road. Miles raced over the train tracks, nearly lost control around a tight bend in the road, barely missed wrapping the back end around a roadside tree.

  “Jesus man, chill,” he said.

  “We’ve got to get as far south as we can before the EMP hits. When that happens, all these new Japanese and Korean hunks of junk will be dead where they sit. It’ll be like a graveyard of cars and people mingling and asking questions. I don’t want to get caught up in all that.”

  The country road took them from Pennsylvania into Maryland with almost no notice. There was only a change of color on the asphalt. Ben glanced down the state line and marveled at life along the Pennsylvania/Maryland border. One guy, where his house was built, he could sit on his back porch in Pennsylvania, but go to bed in Maryland. People who straddle states, he wondered, where are they really grounded?

  Two white signs ahead faced them: 550 North and 550 South. There was some traffic, but it was light like you’d expect on the rural roads while the nation was under attack by what many of these people would consider unidentified objects. Being rural, with a lower population along the border, they didn’t see but a few drones passing overhead, and not much destruction.

  Sliding sideways into Hwy 550, they clipped a Hyundai at the stop sign which spun them around heading north. Grunting, Miles clearly wanted to go south. Sitting in the middle of the two lane highway, Miles threw the car in reverse, smoking the tires as he got some speed, cranked the wheel and spun the front end around. Halfway through the spin, he jammed the car in drive, barked the tires and they shot forward, weaving in and out of traffic like maniacs once more.

  “All these people are going to die,” he told Miles.

  “Not these ones. They have cows and crops and plenty of land. It’ll be the worst inside the cities. Especially the big cities. Columbus, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington. It’s going to be a nightmare if you get caught there.”

  “And we’re going to—”

  “Washington.”

  They navigated the two lane road as best as they could, Miles finally being forced to slow down and not go a hundred miles an hour. This put Ben at ease some because the tires were heating up and getting a little slick around the corners at higher speeds.

  Heading down 550, they passed by a world he hadn’t seen since his campaign days, and not even then. The life he was seeing was a simpler looking life. Even though he knew these folks had challenges he couldn’t imagine, they somehow had that idyllic feel, like maybe in another life he’d choose their world over his own.

  His eyes clearing, his mood sobering to the fact that he was no longer having to slog through the mire that was D.C. politics and that his family was gone, he didn’t much care if they lived or died. His mood darkened and he found himself getting pissed off.

  By then they passed by brick churches and painted clapboard businesses. They passed people talking on the side of the road. They passed a cow. Ben couldn’t stop thinking about the disruption of life that was about to occur. He saw a woman chatting up three other women in front of a roadside café and he wondered how they would survive without running water, electricity, proper sewage systems. He wondered if they could grow their own food, make their own fires, defend their homes if they needed to do so with a weapon.

  The scene was soon a blur as they picked up speed again.

  Miles was back to riding the brakes and cursing under his breath at how slow these “country hicks” drove.

  These people had to know what was going on, he thought to himself. They had to have a sense of impending doom. Looking around, he felt like there was an unmistakable feel of unease hanging over the air. He imagined it felt so bad, it forced the smart folks into hiding. Or maybe he was presuming too much. Maybe it was just him. Maybe he was the one feeling like this because he was in hiding and he didn’t feel very smart.

  While easing up to a stop sign with three cars in front of them, a twenty-something kid at the corner with longish brown hair in his face, tight jeans and a checkered T glanced over at them. His eyes landed on Ben. The kid did a double take then turned back to his friends. More sly now, he glanced back again, guarded this time, talking fast to his friends.

  Ben didn’t know if the kid was excited thinking he was seeing the President or if he was mesmerized by the muscle car. It was a badass car, even if it was Miles’s ride. On closer look though, the kid’s eyes were definitely on him. And his mouth? It was still moving about a thousand miles an hour. The cars ahead of them went through the stop sign, and after a moment, they were at a crossroads, Miles complexly unaware of the attention they were getting.

  Ben looked away from the kids, offering them nothing even though he imagined they must be beside themselves wondering why the President was out in the middle of rural Maryland in a muscle car looking like death brought out to dry.

  As they drove through Sabillasville they saw miles of green fields, endless trees, telephone poles and miles of telephone wire draped not only from house to house but across the highway, too. Then one of those wires suddenly caught fir
e and burned the line to a transformer where it exploded in a shower of sparks.

  “It’s here,” Ben said.

  “Yep.”

  The EMP was real. Lines all over were burning. Transformers were exploding up as far ahead as he could see. As they raced down the highway, dodging cars now coasting to a stop on the side of the road, sections of the telephone lines dropping, sparking out. Several of the wooden phone poles were now on fire, their transformers fizzling beside them. Cars were slowing to the side of the road, even though theirs was now charging ahead full steam, almost like Miles was desperate to take advantage of those last few seconds before the confusion turned people into the inconveniences they would surely become.

  Up ahead, they roared up the highway, driving parallel to the train tracks and through some incredibly dense forest. To the right, deeper into the trees was Camp David. He would not go there. Never again. Up ahead, there were a few cars stalled in the road, and what looked like an accident.

  “Great,” Miles growled.

  “What’s your hurry? Time isn’t even going to matter from this point out.”

  “There’s a rendezvous with the people…involved.”

  “I’m sure your little friends won’t mind if you’re a bit late.”

  “They’re heading west hoping to meet The Silver Queen in person. I would like to go with them. We both need to go.”

  “How far west are you planning on going?” Ben asked, eyeing him sideways.

  “Maybe Colorado. Texas. We’ll get word from her, some way.”

  “You guys are fools. You think the new God of this world cares about you? She likes you enough to eradicate nearly your entire species. And now you want to travel through what will soon be a veritable hell to meet her? You won’t know what she looks like. You won’t be able to call, to text, to IM her. How did you think this was going to play out, Miles?”

  Waving a dismissive hand, he pulled up to the accident, couldn’t see a way through, then said, “This is going to hurt.” Shaking his head and short on options, Miles found the weakest point in the pile up, eased the Chevelle forward against nearly frantic urgings by the owners of those cars to “Stop!” and worked the gas pedal.