The First Hours

by Christine Conaway

  Teagan hoped her homecoming was everything she thought it would be. With Maddy and kids being gone for the weekend, he may not even be there. What if he had made plans away from home? Would they be under an obligation to stay until her husband returned? Teagan hoped not. In fact, she would flat out refuse. She needed to get home. Her father was probably freaked out by now. He probably knew she wasn’t at Nancy’s by now and he would be livid and probably try to send her on the biggest guilt trip ever. The only good thing Teagan saw coming from the apocalypse was he would never find out she’d taken his credit card without permission. Ryan was right, though; her dad would never know, unless she confessed, which she had been known to do in the past. She’d give it some thought.

  Maddy was right about her town. She’d said it was small. It looked to Teagan like the only functioning business was the two-pump gas station, and it had a sign in the door that said NO GAS!!! Without electricity, the windows were dark and uninviting. Unless they physically tried the door, they wouldn’t know if it was open or if they had anything to sell. On the other side of the street stood another building that looked like it had seen better days. The front windows were boarded up and looked as if they had been for some time. Peeling red paint hung off the plywood. The sign told of better days when used items had value. Buy Sell or Trade seemed to be the name of the business. Several small houses sat close to the road with postage-stamp-sized front yards. No children’s toys lay abandoned in the tall grass nor any indication that the houses were occupied.

  Nobody stopped them as they walked the center of the two-lane road. Either no cars have been traveling the road when the apocalypse struck, or the vehicles had been pushed away somewhere out of sight. The only business to show any sign of operation was the Hometown Nursery. The yard where fruit trees and plants had been surrounded by a chain-link fence that looked new, the concrete at the base of the posts clean and weed-free. Teagan wondered if the fence had been a work in progress before, or if someone had worked through the night putting it up.

  Teagan shifted Kevin’s weight and wished Maddy would slow down. Ryan had dropped back behind Teagan, and she wondered if he was as tired as she was. Had they not been so close to Maddy’s home, she would be having second thoughts about helping her get her kids home.

  Her finger reminded her it was sticking straight out every time she bumped it. It was only a minor injury and not a severe as the beating Ryan had taken from the fat man, but it felt significant to Teagan. Between it and her tooth, Teagan found it hard to concentrate. She knew she should be paying more attention to their surroundings, but she just couldn’t. The extra weight from Kevin on her back, and the loaded backpack hanging off her chest made her knees hurt. Humped over, Teagan had to use all her concentration to put one foot in front of the other.

  “I glad we’re almost there,” Ryan said. “I don’t think I could have made it much further.”

  Teagan hadn’t realized he’d caught up to her and stumbled. She caught herself, and repositioned Kevin and wrapped her arms more firmly under the boy’s legs. He never stirred and hadn’t made a sound since he’d been placed on her back. She could see that Kyle, hung in the sling on Ryan’s back, was fast asleep, drool running from the corner of his mouth. She couldn’t imagine how Maddy was going to keep her children safe. As much as she’d tried, Teagan couldn’t imagine why the woman had remained in her car all night when she’d been so close to home. Teagan would like to think if she had been in Maddy’s shoes, she would have started walking as soon as possible and why didn’t someone traveling with three small children have a stroller?

  “There you go judging someone you know nothing about,” she mumbled. She knew nothing about Maddy and had no business criticizing her. If Teagan were to criticize anyone, she should be using the same standards with herself.

  Thinking back on her actions, she should have told her father what she wanted to do. Instead, she had gone behind his back, taken his credit card and used it even though she hadn’t planned on actually billing it to the card, and left without out anyone but Nancy knowing where she’d gone. There was no way she could explain it to her father that made any sense, and now she may never get the chance to tell him she was sorry.

  Maddy’s house sat back from the road. The woman waited for Teagan and Ryan to catch up before leaving the pavement. The drive was lined by bushes and trees grew at random intervals around the property.

  “This is it,” she said excitedly. “This is where I live. I can’t thank the two of you enough for helping me. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along.”

  “I think you’d have made it home eventually,” Ryan told her.

  Maddy hung her head, “I’m not so sure. When that guy stole our lunch, I kind of lost it. I couldn’t believe it happened. I guess I should have put the boys in their stroller and started walking long before that guy came around, and you guys showed up, but I was so sure the car was going to start.”

  “Stroller? Like one of those wheeled things you push kids in?” Ryan’s face began turning redder than just the handprints marking his skin.

  Teagan groaned, trying not to say anything. Ryan was clearly making her point. Why hadn’t they asked Maddy if she’d had a stroller for them?

  Maddy nodded, “In the trunk of the car. It’s so big I can’t hardly get it out of the trunk without help. I used to use it for jogging before this little girl came along.” She patted the babies butt and frowned. What she had needlessly put Teagan and Ryan through began to show on her face. Wrinkles appeared around her eyes and her mouth puckered, her eyes turned glassy, “Oh my God! I am so stupid.”

  From the look on Ryan’s face, Teagan knew he agreed. So did Teagan, but they had been under severe pressure when they’d loaded the kids up and having already cast her own judgment on Maddy, she couldn’t add to the way Maddy felt right then.

  “Madeline? Maddy!” A man came running down the driveway. Reaching Maddy, he slammed into her, wrapping her up in his arms. The baby hanging in the sling at her breast began to wail trapped in his crushing hug. He released Maddy, and she jumped back, “Aw jeez, I never saw her.” He saw Teagan and Ryan, “Who are you?”

  “It’s a long story, Richard, and we’re tired. Can we go to the house and I’ll explain everything?”

  Richard dropped his arm around Maddy’s shoulder possessively and pulled her to him. “Yes. You’ve certainly got some explaining to do.”

  Richards tone was less than friendly as if his Ryan and Teagan accompanying Maddy home wasn’t something he wanted to see. Teagan couldn’t help but notice the anger on his face. She wondered if Maddy had been going for a visit to her mother at all.

  Chapter Ten

  As Tom drove to the freeway on the two-lane highway, he passed a sign that told him he was on highway 213, three miles from the Interstate. He had three miles to sift through everything Nancy told him. He knew Teagan had gone with another girl to spend the weekend with the rest of her graduating class in Newport. When she had brought it up the month before, he had tried to discourage her from going and thought he had been successful. As a deputy sheriff, he knew the trouble a group of kids could find themselves in, whether they planned on it or not. Someone inevitably found a way to buy alcohol, and as much as Tom trusted Teagan not to drink, too many times he’d heard of girls being drugged by someone dropping something into their glass. A bunch of teenagers, about to try their wings out after graduation would be the perfect recipe for trouble. He thought they had now found themselves with more trouble than they could ever have imagined.

  “Keep your eyes open. It’s going to be slow going with the cars parked wherever they stopped,” Tom told the girls. The off-ramp from the southbound side was plugged solid, and he supposed people had coasted their cars down until they stopped. In most cases, resting against the car in front of them. The underside of the overpass was gridlocked with cars. Tom saw no way through. He swung up on to the on-ramp, which was free of vehicles.

/>   “Tom? Aren’t we going the wrong direction?” Carrie turned and looked over her shoulder as they moved up the northbound on-ramp and slumped around in her seat, “There must be hundreds of them.”

  “I expected there to be. I hadn’t counted on so many cars wedged under the overpass. I’ll get us turned around, and we’ll be heading the right direction.”

  Tom had the transmission in second while he maneuvered between and around vehicles. When the opportunity presented itself, he shifted to third gear until he found an emergency vehicle turn around. The Kaiser exit was right in front of them, but Tom feared the underpass would be just as blocked and swung onto the dirt path connecting the north and southbound sides.

  “This is where it could get tricky. If we’re going to have problems, it’ll be on the overpasses.” He went to tell them to keep watch and be on guard, but one glance at Carrie told him she was. She had her department issue Glock resting in her lap.

  “Once we get past Salem, we should be okay, shouldn’t we?” Nancy leaned on the back of Tom’s seat, talking in his ear. When he flinched, she realized how loud she’d spoken. “Sorry. I just feel so useless back here.”

  “And I can’t concentrate with you breathing down my neck,” Tom laughed.

  In the rearview, Tom saw Nancy stick her bottom lip out, and it reminded him of Teagan, but when she was much younger. Something, maybe movement behind them caught his attention, and he peered carefully into the mirror, “Nancy, put your seatbelt on, and keep your head down. Carrie, you better buckle up and be ready.”

  Tom adjusted the mirror for better sight and worked his way around a minivan partially blocking his lane. As soon as he’d cleared it, he stepped on the gas, only to slam on the brakes a second later. Carrie braced herself against the dash with her hand to hold herself back.

  “Tom…oh my Lord…what now?”

  Cars had been pushed to the side of the roadway to form a bottleneck, and they were being herded toward a blockade where Tom could see armed people standing on the far side of the cars used to stop anyone from traveling through. With the aid on the rearview mirror, Tom saw an older pickup truck idling behind them.

  Tom took a deep breath and slowly let it out, he had a decision to make. He couldn’t turn around, but he was damned if he was going to have his search for Teagan sidelined because the road was blocked. He had no idea if these were the good guys or not, but anyone who would think it was okay to force people into a situation such as this couldn’t have anyone’s best interests in mind, but their own.

  “What are we going to do?” Carrie switched her gaze from in front of them to the back. “That’s not a car behind us. It’s one of those side-by-side things that carry more than one person, and the passenger is holding a rifle, but it’s not pointing at us.”

  “Good news and bad news…I’m not going to find out which side these guys are on. Hold on.” Tom told them and began a three-point turn. He grimaced when he struck one of the automobiles lining the shoulder. “Son of a…” The scrape of metal on metal made him grit his teeth, but he didn’t stop. As soon as he was pointing in the direction he came from, Tom stepped hard on the gas.

  The driver put his vehicle into reverse when he realized that Tom wasn’t slowing down. Tom didn’t let up on the gas, and while he was still going slow, it had to be clear he wasn’t stopping for anyone. The side-by-side backed until he cleared the chute. Tom sped by him keeping his head low just in case.

  “They didn’t even raise their guns,” Nancy whispered. She watched behind them.

  “Are they coming after us?”

  “No, but why would they move out of the way so fast? Did they want us to escape?”

  Tom shook his head as he sped up the southbound lanes, “I have no idea, and I don’t want to find out. We’ll go up and take one of the city-center exits and try to get around them.”

  “Is that wise? It seems like there would be more of a concentration of people in town. Maybe we should take the 99w?”

  As Tom worked his way through the parked cars, he thought about Carrie's words. Downtown had office buildings, both private and Government, with a few coffee shops and boutiques. There were no big shopping centers or food stores. He felt sure that the workers would have left the area when the lights went out. Why would they stay? With most businesses being run with the aid of the computer, internet, or phones, nothing could be accomplished without them. Few companies even kept paper records anymore, and most younger employees wouldn’t know how to access anything from a paper file. He felt safe using the city streets as the route through. Had he not been familiar with the layout, he may have been intimidated by the turns needed to pass through. As he crossed below 99E, he saw nothing had seemed to have changed for the homeless who hung out on the streets. As he passed by one small group, a man held up a sign, “Homeless Vet. God Bless, anything helps.” Tom shook his head. “Nothing changes for them.”

  “Those people always scare me,” Nancy said, leaning forward between the front seats. “Remember when Teagan and I came down to the capital for our Civics class? We volunteered to be honorary pages for a week, and we never went back after the first day.”

  Tom nodded because Teagan had come home horrified by what went on in state legislature. All she and Nancy had to do was deliver correspondence and legislative material to officials in the building during legislative sessions. This part had been okay until she’d overheard a senator bargaining for another senator’s vote. She’d said it sounded more like the senator was trying to blackmail the other man into voting the way he wanted, and the other had agreed to as long as the senator changed his vote on another bill coming up the next day. She’d even quoted the senator, “If you want to play ball here, you need to remember whose back to scratch.”

  The senator had caught Teagan staring at him and hustled the other man away, but later that day, Teagan had been taken aside asked not to return. They told her they had made a mistake and taken on too many volunteers. She had come home indignant and just a little disheartened about state government.

  “Tom, where did everybody go? All these cars are deceiving, I haven’t seen one person except for those homeless people. Do you think they all just left?” Cassie stared around at the parked cars.

  Cassie was right, the pay for parking lots were full, as well as any curb parking with cars sitting wherever they’d rolled to a stop. Hoods were up, and some doors were open. It was evident by the broken windows on those apparently locked, that someone had gone through them searching for valuables. He wondered if this is what was happening on only the second day how bad it was going to get after a week. People would be getting desperate when the food ran out if it hadn’t happened already.

  Tom had to make a couple of left turns to get back on business 99E, one of the only streets that would return them to the freeway. At one point, he and the girls had to push two vehicles out of the way. Both were unlocked, and one had the keys still in the ignition. Maybe whoever owned the car hadn’t realized the magnitude of the event and was hoping someone would steal it and they could claim the insurance.

  As Tom weaved his way up the ramp onto the interstate, Cassie tried to see what was happening. “I guess it’s okay to get on the road if you’re leaving town, but you just can’t come in.” She shook her head, “That doesn’t make any sense at all. Why not just let people through?”

  “We don’t know if they were stopping people or not. For all we know, they were taking what they wanted and letting them go. We don’t know, and I don’t care to find out. We have 21 miles to Highway 20, and hopefully, we’ll find Teagan somewhere along the way.”

  “But what if they made it all the way to the coast?”

  “If the plans didn’t change that Nancy and Teagan had and they left around the same time, I don’t think they had enough time to get all the way there, but if they did, I'd drive to the coast. I’m not going home until I find her.”

  Tom frowned and met Nancy’s eyes in the mirror, “N
ancy, do you know what kind of a car your friend drives?” He hadn’t considered the other girl's car Teagan was riding in and hoped Nancy had an idea.

  Nancy furrowed her brow, chewing her lip, “Um, she’s not really a friend of either of us; we’re just in the same class, but it’s a BMW. A sporty looking car. The only reason I remember is that while everyone at school made fools of themselves over her birthday present, she was bitching about it being last years model and not the Mercedes coupe that she wanted.” She realized what she’d said, “Sorry Mr. Cooper. If you’d heard her, you would have called it bitching too. The car was practically brand new. White with real leather interior…” she let her words trail off with the memory. “I bet they wish Teagan had driven her car. At least they would have gotten to the coast.”

  “We should be happy if they didn’t make it that far. At least it gives us less ground to cover.” As Tom talked, he checked every car they passed just in case Nancy was wrong. There was not as much traffic going south, once they got away from the Salem area. He thought about the house and who was doing what back in Garland. Had Simon gone back to the house or had he taken Tom’s advice and gone to his parents? Other than his actions yesterday and being a little over-exuberant about crash and crime scenes, he actually was a competent deputy. Tom briefly wondered why his opinion changed.

  When Tom returned home, he would make a point of checking to see that Simon and his parents were in a position to survive. If their situation deteriorated as badly as he thought it would be in town, Tom thought about something he had preached to Teagan. Situational awareness. There was no way that four people could effectively secure and defend the house. Within the week, chaos would reign, and those who weren’t prepared for the long run would take to the streets. He couldn’t imagine the lengths people would go to keep from starving, and anyone who had children would go beyond stealing to see their children were fed. He knew he would do everything in his power to see that Teagan survived, and now he’d taken on the responsibility of Nancy and Carrie if they cared to stay.