by William Oday
The doctor nodded. “Yes, I do. The population of Kodiak is six thousand people. While Project Hermes was never made to house that number, we can host as many as needed for a short time. I have made other arrangements for more long term living. For now, you must get as many people as possible to the dock at Ushiankiak Bay by tomorrow night. Our latest projections have the fallout making landfall the following morning. That gives us a buffer of twelve hours to get everyone underground before it hits.”
“Where’s the entrance?”
“It’s inside the power station on Terror Lake. A four mile drive from the dock and we’ll have every vehicle at our disposal waiting to transport people to the facility. Space will be precious, so only bring what you can carry.”
Murmurs of indignation echoed around the tight space.
Not a problem for Bob. He didn’t have squat. Everything he owned may as well have been on another planet. Assuming it wasn’t already radioactive dust.
“So, we’re just supposed to up and leave everything behind? Our homes and land and property?”
Dr. Yong nodded. “If you want to live? Yes.”
There wasn’t time for the crowd to digest this latest bit of information because the crack of gunshots echoed in.
Stuckey threw open the door to the front of the store and more gunfire echoed in. “They found us!” He turned to the doctor. “Go out the back door to the alley. It’s past the bathroom and to the left.”
The bodyguard nodded and pulled his charge in the indicated direction.
“The rest of you,” Stuckey shouted, “follow me!”
Being unarmed and generally a coward, Bob had no intention of following, but the current of bodies flooding through carried him along for the ride.
Bob stumbled forward doing everything he could not to fall down and get stampeded. He made it out and fanned out along the shelf running the length of the aisle. Men and women with rifles tucked into their shoulders lined up along the shelf like soldiers in trench warfare.
A dozen trucks in a half-circle were parked on the road beyond the gas pumps outside. All of their headlights lit up the front as bright as day.
Henry was tucked behind a gas pump for cover with his rifle held at the ready. Shafts of light punched through the air around him.
Twenty or more gas cans of various shapes and sizes sat on the ground in the middle of the parking lot. A large circular hatch lay next to the dark hole where a fuel crank and siphon hose lay on the ground.
One end of the hose snaked down into the underground tank while the other end leaked fuel onto the pavement.
Ronnie Dean was nowhere to be seen.
The glass windows shattered as bullets tore through air.
People standing on both sides of Bob returned fire.
The deafening sounds made his ears first ring and then ache like needles were poking his eardrums. He was about to drop down below the lip of the shelf when something outside caught his attention.
A spark on the pavement.
A single flame jumped higher.
A trail that tracked along the spilled fuel toward its source.
The growing orange glow lit up Henry as he made the sign of the cross over his heart.
The fire enveloped the spilled fuel around the crank.
The next instant, there was nothing but heat and light like the surface of the sun.
The explosion flung Bob backward even as it sucked the air out of his lungs.
His head struck something hard and he thought, for the instant before it was over, that he was thankful to go out like this.
It was way better than wasting away from radiation poisoning.
26
MARCO opened his mouth and pain shot through his jaw. He eased it shut and the joint clicked, sending another electric zap through his head.
The butt end of a rifle did that kind of damage.
He started to reach up to massage it, but just as quickly gave up when the tape binding his hands behind his back stopped the movement.
They’d been loaded up into an old school that looked like an antique from an old TV show. Where they’d dug it up, he didn’t know. But there was no way it had carted kids around for at least several decades.
At the front of the bus, the driver took a left turn onto Mill Bay Road faster than was safe or sane. The tires squealed and all the occupants, prisoners was more accurate, slid to to the right.
Marco bumped into Chief Stuckey. The two shared a bench seat made for three school children and not for two grown men. The contact sent another pain signal jabbing into his brain. He grimaced and focused on not passing out.
Stuckey shifted toward the aisle in a futile attempt to give him some more room.
Oscar was nowhere to be seen.
Did he survive?
Marco didn’t know what happened to him after the explosion. There was chaos and people dying and then the gang members loading the survivors on this bus.
Several stood at the front, laughing and jeering and taking turns aiming their rifles at the captives like they were about to spray them all down.
Seated in the last row, Marco and Stuckey were furthest away, but not far enough to escape a hard rain of bullets.
“How’s your jaw?” Stuckey said in a whispered voice.
“Don’t think it’s broken,” Marco replied. He spoke through barely parted lips. Anything wider than half an inch invited agony.
“You’ll be lucky if not. You got cracked hard.”
Marco nodded. That was an understatement. His face felt like it gotten hit by a train. “You don’t look much better. Your lip looks like a split sausage.”
Stuckey licked his lower lip and winced. “Least I knocked out that bastard’s front teeth.” He glanced to the front.
Alexei Volkov stood there with a rifle in one hand and his other on the driver’s seat for balance. Even in the dim glow of the inadequate overhead lighting, the twisted grimace contorting his bushy beard was obvious. Somewhere hidden behind that beard was a mouth with two fewer teeth.
Stuckey shook his head. “Red’s the type you had to be watchful around in the best of times. But now, he’s a dangerous animal let loose. One with a thirst for violence and mayhem. I should’ve put him down long ago.”
The bus hit a pothole and the back end jolted upward lifting Marco off his seat for an instant. He slammed back down and his teeth crashed together.
Blinding pain shot through the center of his head.
“You okay?”
The image of Stuckey and the surrounding world seemed far away. Like Marco was looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Stay with me. We’ve got to be ready when the opportunity presents itself.” Stuckey pivoted away. “I’ve got the edge of the tape up, but can’t get it off with my wrists pinned together.”
Stuckey scooted back until he bumped into Marco. “Can you grab hold of the end and pull?”
Marco shifted around, feeling with his fingers until he found the lifted corner of the duct tape around Stuckey’s wrists. He pinched it and scooted forward.
The tape slipped through his fingers.
He scooted back, found it again, and pinched as hard as his fingers could. He scooted forward and felt the tape pull free a couple of inches.
Now, they just had to do that about thirty more times.
The bus stopped before they’d completed half that number.
“It’s getting looser,” Stuckey said. “Keep going.”
The accordion door at the front squealed open.
“Everybody out!” Red shouted as he yanked the man in the first seat to his feet.
“Hurry!” Stuckey said.
Marco had the urge to respond because he was already moving as fast as he could considering he was clinging to consciousness and he had almost no freedom or room to maneuver.
But he kept his mouth shut.
It was less painful that way.
He managed to pull off a few more layers when
he abruptly stopped.
“What are you two doing?” Red shouted, towering above them. He had to hunch over from the low ceiling. A flashlight appeared in his hand and clicked on.
Their seat was suddenly bathed in blinding light.
“What do we have here?” he said in a voice that indicated he knew exactly what they had. He grabbed a fistful of Stuckey’s hair and slammed his head forward.
The chief’s face bounced off the steel bar of the seat in front. A nasty cut across the bridge of his nose gaped open and blood poured out and into his mouth.
Stuckey spat a spray of blood up into Red’s face.
Their captor didn’t take it well.
He slammed the Chief’s face into the seat again. Hard enough this time so that Stuckey’s eyes lost focus.
Red leaned down and got into Stuckey’s face. His breath reeked of vodka vapors and poor dental hygiene. “CB’s going to punish the both of you. In ways you can’t imagine.”
The glow of light landed across the side of Red’s head and Marco noticed the angry hole of pink skin where an ear should’ve been.
The visual made his stomach flop.
The light moved and the horrific injury dropped into shadow.
Red yanked Stuckey to his feet and shoved him forward through the aisle.
Marco quickly stood and followed as his jaw couldn’t take any more abuse. Their eyes drew close as he passed. “Who is CB?”
Red’s eyes flamed with excitement.
And something else.
He’d seen it before.
Somewhere.
The memory surfaced.
In the churches of his youth.
In those filled with the Holy Spirit.
The total belief.
The rapturous embrace of the destruction of reason and personal will.
It frightened him then. It frightened him now.
Red pulled him closer until their eyes were so close an invisible current crackled between. “Chernobog. The Dark One.”
27
The bus had stopped in the parking lot of the Kodiak Island Brewing Company. The squat single story structure with all glass front didn’t seem like a great choice for a defensible position.
Marco followed the other captives through a gauntlet of gun-toting gang members as they whooped and hollered. Several took cheap shots as prisoners filed past, knocking them to the ground and then laughing harder than ever.
An older man took a punch to the gut and collapsed to the pavement. He rolled over onto his back, clutching his stomach.
Marco stuttered a step as he recognized him.
It was Bob Randy! That slimy producer from Sole Survivor. The reality TV show that had brought Marco to the island and now, like so many other things, meant nothing and only served as a sad memory of life before the end of the world.
Marco felt zero empathy for his suffering. It was his fault that Marco was here in the first place. If only that call had gone to voicemail. If only he’d said no. He’d still be back on his family’s land west of Baker, Montana. Folks were probably doing fine out there. There were no population centers or military bases nearby so the nukes probably never hit anywhere in the region.
In fact, maybe life would be better for him now. The bank that was trying to take his land probably no longer functioned. All the computer records of what he owed were now nothing more than scattered electrons.
But he’d answered the call.
And he’d accepted the offer.
Which brought him to Emily. He never would’ve met her without going on the show. Not that it mattered now because she was gone.
It was a lot to process in the seconds that he watched Bob crumpled on the ground in agony. A huge kid helped him up to his feet. He looked familiar, too. Rome. Flo’s son.
Now a son without a mother.
Whereas Mr. Hollywood’s suffering didn’t produce a spark of sympathy in Marco’s chest, the boy’s loss hit him square in the chest.
He knew what it was like to lose your parents at a young age.
The line shuffled forward through an open space between two parked buses. As soon as the group passed, an old delivery truck fired up and pulled across the open space to close the perimeter.
Marco glanced around as they headed toward the front door.
The place was well chosen as a defensible position. It backed up to a steep hill and the perimeter of parked school buses created an open interior courtyard. Gang members carrying rifles walked along the roofs of the stationary buses. They moved from bus to bus by stepping across the narrow gaps between the abutted vehicles.
Nobody was getting through that without a tank or a small army of soldiers.
And with the resistance crushed before it even began, this place was basically impregnable.
Gang members threw open the tinted front doors and light spilled out into the frigid night air.
“Keep it moving!” Red shouted as the visual assault slowed the line. He shoved the man ahead of them in the back which set off a chain reaction of stumbling and recovering from those ahead. He turned back and got in Stuckey’s face. “You’re gonna wish you were dead,” he said with an evil grin.
Stuckey’s nose bled freely down through his mustache and into his mouth. “You know how this ends, Red. It ends with my hands around your neck, strangling you to death.”
Red chuckled. “We’ll see about that after CB is done with you.” He grabbed Stuckey’s jacket by the shoulder and threw him forward.
Marco followed through the front doors into a large open space. The right half of the room had long tables filled with more than a dozen gang members drinking as much beer as they spilled.
That was probably another big reason for this being their headquarters.
With all the grocery store shelves stripped bare days ago, this brewery must’ve drawn these idiots in like gnats to sweat.
Their captors guided them to the open area occupying the left half of the room. They shoved them together into a tight huddle of bodies.
Several glaring bright lights close to the back wall completely hid whatever was behind them.
Marco glanced in that direction and quickly shielded his eyes from the brightness. He wondered how they had this much power going. Some kind of rudimentary twelve volt battery system?
A door squeaked open and the gang members erupted in cheers and garbled swearing and cries of support. Whoever had entered stood hidden from view, beyond the blinding lights. The cacophony of voices echoed through the voluminous interior like an amphitheater.
Red banged the butt of his rifle on the floor several times and bellowed at the assembled drunks. “Quiet!”
The room sunk into silence faster than Marco would’ve thought possible. There was order to this chaos.
A calm, measured voice spoke.
“Well, well, well.”
The words spilled out thick with southern drawl.
“Look what we have here. A big group of concerned citizens. Ready to do what’s right.” He laughed and the facade of civilized reason slipped. There was madness in the high-pitched cackle.
And more than a little.
“Y’all planning something that I should know about?”
None of the prisoners spoke.
“What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue? Well, I can fix that in a New York minute.”
A shadowed silhouette stepped forward between the banks of dazzling lights.
A man of average size.
Through squinted eyes, Marco couldn’t make out much more. But the voice. He knew it.
Charlie from Tennessee.
With shocking speed, Charlie leaped upon a captive in the front. He drove the prisoner to the ground and raked the knife across the poor man’s neck.
A bubbling scream of terror.
Crimson blood geysered through the air and splashed onto the wood plank floor.
Charlie sat down on the man’s chest. The blade flashed through the air and into the man’s mou
th.
A gurgling cry.
A pool of blood grew on the floor.
The lunatic lifted his hand into the air. “Now, I’ve got your tongue!” He put the tongue into his mouth and gnawed off a bite like it was a chunk of beef jerky.
Horrified gasps escaped from several of the captives.
“Jesus,” Chief Stuckey whispered.
The dying man struggled a few more seconds and then went quiet and still.
The killer stood and handed the rest of the tongue to Red. He nodded when the larger man hesitated. Red shoved the whole thing into his mouth and chewed.
Charlie turned back to the prisoners. “Now, I’m gonna ask again, and this time, I’m not going to be so understanding if I don’t get an answer.”
He stepped in front of the lights, partially blocking them.
A halo of illumination glowed around him. A heavenly glow, only this was the devil.
“Hold up a second!” Charlie shouted. He scooted around the group and reached in toward the middle.
The captives melted away like snow near a red-hot branding iron.
He grabbed someone and pulled them out.
Bob.
Charlie held Bob by the collar as he looked around the room. “Look who showed up on my front porch?”
Bob stared at the ground. The fear in his eyes shined brighter than the lights behind.
Charlie grabbed Bob by the ear and twisted hard. The old man yelped and his knees buckled. Charlie dragged him across the floor as Bob scrambled along to keep his ear from getting torn off.
Charlie looked around the room, ensuring he had everyone’s attention. “This man owes me a million dollars.” He released Bob’s ear and let him collapse to the floor. “Are you going to pay me my million dollars?”
Bob held a trembling hand up in surrender while babbling something.
“No? I didn’t think so. I’m gonna save something special for you, Mr. Randy.” He spat out the name like it was a turd in his mouth.
Charlie returned to the gathered captives, looking them over. “Honestly, I don’t want the money anymore. I’ve got something better.”
