EMP Crisis Series (Book 3): Instant Mayhem

by Russell, Mark J.

  The engineer said, almost into Palmer’s ear, “Can’t stop. Punch through it, Black. Faster!”

  Palmer had only a moment to decide. He decided to trust the advice of someone with way more train experience than he. “Punch it.”

  The engineer thrust a lever forward. The momentum that had been trying to knock Palmer onto his face abruptly shifted, then tried to throw him onto his backside. He had a good grip, though. The train accelerated noticeably—apparently, it could speed up faster than it could stop, at the engine’s current RPMs. Palmer didn’t understand power bands all that much, but he could see them in action at that moment.

  The engineer said, “We’ll smash through that thing and hopefully keep our wheels under us. It’s gonna hurt, though, sir. Strap in.” His voice was high-pitched and tight with fear, which was all the motivation Palmer needed. He moved back into the passenger car right behind the engine and sat down. No straps…He wrapped his arms over his head and tucked his head between his knees, as they’d taught on the plane flights he’d taken.

  47

  Danny sprinted across an intersection, paying no attention to the street signs as bullets ricocheted around him—whether someone was shooting at him or he was just in the backdrop of some other firefight going on wasn’t relevant. Those bullets would kill just the same. He put his head down and pumped his arms and legs as hard as he could. Ahead, a single building stood in the middle of a huge parking lot. It had once been a four-window coffee stand, but now it had a stack of sandbags lining three of its walls. The wall he was aiming for had none.

  In the single rear doorway, a man crouched and held it open with one hand, frantically urging Danny on with the other. A hot, buzzing insect whipped past Danny’s ear, and something hot bit his calf as a sudden flurry of bullets bounced all around him. They’d spotted him, on the other side of that parking lot…

  Then, Danny streaked through the doorway, letting himself collapse into a slide that only stopped when his back struck the inside forward wall. The impact threatened to knock the wind out of him. Gasping, he stripped a satchel from over his shoulder and thrust it into the waiting hands of the man who’d waved him in.

  “God bless you,” the man said, and wasted no time tearing into the satchel. He pulled a flurry of medical supplies from it, grabbed two handfuls of the items he needed, and crawled frantically to the far corner in the building, where a man lay gasping and clutching his belly.

  Gut shot…Horrible way to go.

  Danny picked up an AR-15 lying on the floor near one of the two windows inside the small building. Someone slid a nylon duty belt across the cement floor, and it came to rest at his feet. A glance told him it held spare AR magazines. Well, he’d need them. He used his shirt front to wipe blood from the trigger group, checked the magazine and chamber, checked the safety—the gut-shot man had, incredibly, had the presence of mind to flip on the safety before collapsing—and brought the barrel up over the sandbag wall. Bap, bap. He double-tapped the trigger, but whether he hit his target, he couldn’t have said.

  An earthen berm covered in grass edged the parking lot, and even in the daylight, it looked like a line of blinking fireflies had taken up residence atop the berm. At least a dozen muzzles, flashing as they rained murder downrange at the town defenders holding onto whatever large avenue ran past the coffee stand. It was a straight shot down that main boulevard to the defenders’ main defensive line—or rather, the area right behind it. If this coffee stand fell before reinforcements arrived, they’d push all the way down and flank the defenders, and then, whatever tiny chance Burnsville had would die faster than would the people currently locked in a death-match with the main Clarks Crossing assault.

  Oddly, although Danny marveled at how he’d gone from captive to de facto member, he was more surprised that he’d ended up out here on the ass-end of town, holding a desperate delaying action for a town he didn’t live in, fighting alongside people he didn’t know, for a cause he didn’t believe in. He had only come to save his own people from Black, the only way he knew how. Well, Brooke and Misty would do their thing, and it would work, or it wouldn’t. And there were no good guys or bad guys in all of this, other than Black and his goon.

  Damn, the world had gotten confusing since the lights went out. But then, those thoughts were pushed aside as half a dozen people came up over the berm and the other half dozen attackers laid down heavy suppressive fire. As Danny ducked down, he caught sight of his calf, the pants leg having risen up a bit. Spots of blood. The ricochets must have kicked up pavement shrapnel.

  He blinked, then heard one of his fellow defenders shout, “On the wall and shooting, you bastards, in three…two…”

  Danny adjusted his grip on the borrowed AR-15 and prepared to stick his head up into a hail of bullets. But oddly, his last thought before the countdown ended was to wonder how Misty was doing.

  The tallest point on the northern end of town was, oddly, the cathedral’s bell tower, and so it was that they’d occupied the church for his battlefield command post. Scouts with keen eyes and telescopes were at the tippy-top, relaying information to Kent’s aides, who updated maps and directed calls for medics or supplies by means of walkie-talkies. They had crap for range, but he’d been surprised so many were working. Totally legit. It gave his crew an edge, or so he hoped.

  A shout from the bell tower got his attention. “Sir, you need to see this.”

  Kent stood up like a rising piston, then bolted over to a recently-built riser platform—when a ratchet wheel was released, rocks above were free to fall. The rocks were in a net, with ropes from that net to a plywood platform. It was rickety and scary as hell, and when the rocks hit, the platform kept going for a couple feet, feeling like it would throw him up into the ceiling. But, of course, it held, and he staggered off the terrifying ride, onto the catwalk running the tower’s inner circumference.

  “What the hell?”

  A scout handed him binoculars. “Look north-north-west, sir, along the tracks.”

  Kent peered out and, with the scout helping to turn him to the right direction, found it. A train with two cars, barreling down the side spur. It’d rejoin the main line in only a few hundred yards…

  Briefly, he hoped they’d fail to switch the tracks, but immediately realized they had to know about doing that, else they would not have been on the side spur. What they were doing there was anyone’s guess, but there they were, and the odds were good they’d figured out how to switch the tracks. But then, he spotted a railroad boxcar sitting across the railroad tracks. That must have been what Abram had been up to. Would it stop the train? If so, why the hell was the train going so fast? No sparks off the wheels suggested it was slowing down.

  Kent said, “What am I seeing? Why ain’t it slowing down?”

  “I’d guess they think they stand a better chance punching through it.”

  Kent frowned. “And, do they have a better chance?”

  “I can’t say. Maybe.”

  Movement to his right drew Kent’s attention. He scanned right, through the binoculars, trying to find the source of that brief movement he’d seen. It only took a moment. From the east, a mass of troops was rushing west, toward the railway. They couldn’t have been Burnsville’s fighters. “Who’s that?”

  The scout didn’t speak for a couple seconds, then replied, “Looks like the bandits are making a mad dash for the railroad. Not just the half they’re attacking our perimeter with over there. The other half, too. It looks like they’re moving to reinforce there, abandoning the bridge attacks. Most of them, anyways.”

  Yeah, but why was half the enemy force abandoning their push into Burnsville? They’d been pushing Kent’s people back all morning, one building at a time, one block at a time, and yet now they were scrambling all over themselves to abandon the drive, and the precious meters they’d taken from Kent’s people.

  Only one explanation made sense. The enemy had something important on that train. Probably a weapon. “Aww,
damn. They tryin’ to rescue that train, you feel me? We gotta move troops, and fast, dammit. Whatever’s on it, we can’t let them rescue it to use against us. We got to get it first, or at least put down any fool stupid enough to stick their head up.”

  Without waiting for anyone to ratchet the wooden lift back down with him on it—too slow—Kent grabbed one rope with both hands, swung his feet to clasp the rope with them, and slid down the several stories like a soldier rappelling from a helicopter, or a firefighter down a pole. He hit the ground with a painful thud that jarred his back but paid it no mind as he rushed to the table and the radio on it. He hoped Abram had gotten back into town alive, but there was no time to check on him. Not yet. He snatched the handset and brought it to his mouth.

  It was a disaster. The enemy had feinted and was throwing everything to one side after engaging and pinning his frontline troops. Radio reports coming in, in the background, told him the shooting hadn’t stopped elsewhere—it had just evened up the odds, turning the assault into a battle of attrition. That was a fight Burnsville would win, so long as they could keep their attackers from breaking through at the train depot and running amok in the heart of Burnsville.

  “All units, all units,” he said, more loudly than he had intended, “listen up. Santa Claus is movin’ to Cali. This is no joke, Santa Claus is real. Santa is real, west-side.”

  He let out a heavy breath as, after a moment’s pause, the radios came alive with grim voices confirming the orders. Santa Claus was one of the big emergency plans they’d set up. Santa came from the north pole, while California was west. About two-thirds of his units were attached to these emergency movement orders, in planning for such a break-through. Hypothetically. This was all too real, though, and the choo-choo was coming on fast. It seemed unlikely his forces would finish even half their repositioning movement before they were knee-deep in a fight, against almost all of Black’s troops pushing into his turf in just a single sector…

  C’mon, people, you’d best hustle. The clock’s ticking. We’d best hope that boxcar does its thing.

  48

  Moments after Palmer sat and covered his head with his arms, the train jerked—

  And then, chaos erupted. All at once, the train bucked like a giant iron bronco, flinging Palmer forward to smash into the train car’s wall, and a noise unlike anything he’d ever heard seemed to smash his head just as hard as the wall. The world spun, and some part of his mind registered that the car had flipped over.

  A geyser of flame burst through the doorway, flicking the iron door like a bullet to the back of the car; a scream ended suddenly. Half a second later, a riot of screaming, and the smell of burnt flesh.

  Palmer had a single clear thought amidst the storm—he had survived the engine exploding only because he’d been flung into the front wall, and everyone who hadn’t joined him in flight was burning alive, jumping up and screaming.

  A riotous clang-clang-clang sounded, and a rock the size of his head smashed through a side window—the man it struck vanished, leaving only a pair of legs. The metal walls indented as more large rocks plummeted down onto the car.

  His left eye went blind. Palmer reached up and felt something warm and slick, a feeling he recognized innately. Blood, his blood. He had no idea whether he merely had a gash or whether half his skull was caved in. The pain ringing in his head seemed very distant, like it was happening to someone else.

  Over the din of raining stones and screaming human torches, a different sound arose. It was something new, a deep resonance that reminded him of…a whale? He looked toward the sound, over the flickering, smoldering bench seat rows, but the heavy smoke made it impossible to see beyond the bench in front of him. He narrowed his eyes against the smoke, and with a start, he realized that he was crawling toward the shattered, rent door frame, instincts overwhelming any reason. And yet—he looked back again.

  Just beyond the curtain of smoke, something moved, and the new sound rose in pitch—Palmer had time only to gasp before what looked like a wall of shadow seemed to reach out for him. He couldn’t look away, and it moved so fast that he had no time even to scream before it smashed into him, and only then did he register that his new attacker was some kind of liquid…It filled the passenger car, and crushed him into the wall again—

  He was suddenly free of the fiery, smoky hell in the car—open, starry sky above. His thoughts were still struggling to catch up to what was going on around him, and to him, but then one crystal thought struck him. The wave had blown him out the front doorway.

  A heartbeat was all the time he had before he landed hard on his back. Agony struck him almost senseless, something wrong with his leg. He looked down, and discovered a shaft of metal protruding from his left thigh.

  An odd sensation grew into his consciousness, then, covering him from head to toe. What began as a tingle wasted no time before it grew in intensity; even as a wracking cough overcame him, the sensation grew beyond curiosity—it became painful. A burning feeling, from his scalp to the bottoms of his feet, at first no more intense than too much Icy-Hot ointment, but within moments, a scream erupted from his throat. Pain. Burning. How was he on fire? He was wet, it wasn’t possible. In the light of still-blazing fire from the engine up ahead, he looked at his bare hand, and then he screamed once more as he watched the skin of his fingers melt away, revealing bone here and there like hot taffy dripping off a serving ladle.

  Toxic waste.

  Of course, it was the waste. The car had ruptured. He touched his face, but all he felt was fiery pain and something lumpy. This was not good. He needed water. No, help. Someone had to help him. This wasn’t right. This shouldn’t happen to him. He turned his head southward. Gary—his pit bull was coming. Hordes of troops streamed along the riverbank northward.

  River…water…

  Palmer forced himself up. There was no point being gentle with the pole in his leg, because it slid out like a knife through butter, flaying his thigh, but the dark slick that covered him hid the bleeding he knew must be there. But it didn’t matter. He had to reach the water. And help.

  As he put one foot in front of the other, a gurgling sound arose, reaching his consciousness. With horror, he realized the ugly, wet sound rose and fell with each breath he took. The gurgling was him.

  Well, Gary just had to help him. Palmer deserved help, not this…He redoubled his effort to reach the water ahead, but by his third step, the agony burning every inch of his body drove away any conscious thought.

  49

  Nick had driven around Burnsville in a wide arc, going around the army besieging it—or so he’d thought. “What the heck,” he muttered, scanning the enemy lines for a break through which he could get his cargo into town…

  Corey, sitting behind him, said, “This is B.S. Kent told you Gary was attacking from the north, but they’re everywhere. We could have saved time just turning ourselves in on the north side, when we first saw it.”

  Nick frowned. He started to say something—something angry and hot—when the seemingly flat terrain fell away, descending, to reveal a parked car directly in their path. He swerved left, his right arm smashing into Misty across her shoulders and chest to keep her from flying. He struggled to keep control, and it took a second to get his arm to stop doing what it was doing and start to do what he wanted it to, on the steering wheel…

  Misty said to Corey, “Sugar, you need to understand why Kent said to come in where he did. That was before the fight moved and spread. We ain’t been on the radio since, and goin’ around these jackasses took longer’n your daddy had hoped, that’s all. Things changed. They always do, so get used to that, honey.”

  Nick grinned, though he glanced, nervous, into the rearview to double-check they weren’t being chased. “Nicely put, Misty. That’s exactly right, Corey. The situation changed, that’s all.”

  As Nick looked over his shoulder to make eye contact with his son, he saw the young man’s eyes grow suddenly wide as they flicked to somethi
ng over Nick’s shoulder—he spun around just in time to see a pickup truck in their way, a truck with a mighty big gun mounted on a pole that stuck up from the truck bed near the cabin’s back window. They passed it closely enough that, for one brief moment, he and the gunner manning it had made eye contact.

  “Look out,” Corey shouted, though Nick had already veered enough to clear the pickup truck.

  The vehicle rocked violently from the erratic movement on the loose, semi-sandy soil.

  Once Nick had it back under control, he glanced in the rearview again. The gunner he’d “shared a moment” with had swung the barrel all the way around, and—

  Nick had no way to know where it would have been safe to try to enter the town. The forest was two hundred yards away, mostly to his rear. An enemy with a damn machine gun was sighting in on him. And, of course, they were out in the open on gently rolling, grassy hills.

  Oh crap, we’re gonna die—

  The SUV’s rear window exploded, and several deep-sounding reports echoed over them, closer than the myriad small-arms fire coming from every possible direction within the town. He winced, expecting to feel a big bullet rip off an arm or punch through a lung, but instead, the gunfire stopped.

  Stunned and confused, Nick stomped the brake, fighting with the steering wheel as the SUV skid and began to veer right. As soon as it stopped, he stuck his head out through the sunroof and looked back.

  Fortune was on his side, that day. The bastard bandit with the machine gun stood over it, pounding against its upper receiver with the meaty part of one fist, as though that would clear a jammed round. But it wouldn’t hold him for long. Nick sought any kind of cover he could exploit to get something solid between himself, his son, and Misty against the gunner, but there was nothing close enough.