“Shelter from the storm,” said Barb. There was a sort of steely look in her eyes, as if she were remembering distant situations, difficult memories coming up from the past. “I was in South Africa in the nineties…. there were some terrible things that happened…” She trailed off.
“So,” said Meg. “We’re going to need an answer. Are we a team, or what?”
Barb looked her right in the eyes. Then she looked at James, then back at Meg. “Yes,” she said. “You’re right. I’ve been out of the loop here. I haven’t been seeing what you’re seeing. If you’re telling the truth, then things are even worse than what I’ve seen in Africa and Eastern Europe. Things can get bad quickly…. if there’s anyone who knows that, it’s me.”
“I lost my dad,” said Meg. “Very recently. Lost him to people who should have been our allies. And my whole life my dad kept telling me about the dangers… the dangers of people… how there’s an ugly side to humanity…. he died proving it to me…. and saving me at the same time…. he did everything he could so that I could survive…. it was his idea for me to come out here to the Berkshires. I owe it to him to survive. I can’t tolerate anything less than a serious attempt to survive.”
Barb nodded brusquely. “I see what you’re saying,” she said.
It was as if Barb had shifted into another person, to her world-traveler reporter persona, the non-vacation personality that had dealt with more than the average human had.
“You in too, James?” said Meg. “Ready to take this seriously?”
James looked between them. He seemed to pick up the new mood in the room. He nodded in a businesslike way. “I’ll get some snow,” he said. “You’re right. We’ve got to put out that fire.”
“It’s been what, ten minutes now that it’s been burning?”
“More like twenty-five.”
“I think it’s already too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late to stay here.”
“You think someone’s already seen the smoke? Already decided to come here?”
Meg nodded. “We’re only a few days from the EMP,” she said. “The majority of the population is still alive.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“People are going to die. A lot of them. But it’ll take a while. Violence will tear through the population, but percentage wise I don’t think the deaths will be as great due to violence as they will be from just simple hypothermia and dehydration.”
“What about starvation?”
“Takes longer. Thirty days.”
“Right. There are a lot of other things that will kill people before then…. but the point is that there are still a lot of people out there. A lot of threats.”
“A lot of enemies.”
“Exactly.”
“But if we leave here, where do we go?”
“I’ve got a truck,” said Meg.
James nodded. “It’s a good one,” he added.
“And I’ve got some gear. I say I go get my truck.”
“How long will that take?”
“A day to walk there. Maybe more.”
“You’ve got to sleep, Meg,” said James. “How long has it been since we slept?”
Meg shook her head. “There’s no time for that,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I drive the truck back here.”
“That might take a while. There weren’t exactly roads… we hiked across the open land…. just fields and wooded areas.”
“Yeah,” said Meg. “I’ll have to get directions from you, Barb. But I’m sure there’s some way to get back here by roads that won’t take forever.”
“I don’t know,” said Barb. “It depends where you’re parked.”
“I’d have to show you on a map. I’m not familiar enough with the area to explain it to you.”
“Well, I have a map. But there are some places around here that just don’t have a lot of roads.”
“What do you think, James?” said Meg. “Do you think my Tacoma would make it off-roading through the snow the way we walked? You seem to know your vehicles.”
James thought for a moment, his eyes looking up to the ceiling. It was obvious he was trying to picture the route in his head. “I think it might make it,” he said. “There are some places where the path was pretty narrow…. but I think you could go around those.”
“Why didn’t you two just drive out here anyway, if the truck would make it?”
“We were trying not to be seen.”
“Well, I guess that’s still a risk, then,” said Barb. “And you’ll be on your own in a truck. What if you get stuck out there?”
Meg shrugged. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “The real problem is that we only have one weapon. And I’m taking it with me. You two will be undefended.”
“I’m worried about you getting stuck out there,” said James. “It’s not like you have a winch or anything. And it’s not like you can call Triple A to get you out or trust that some passerby will help you out.”
“With any luck, there won’t be any passersby at all,” said Meg.
James, who had been dumping snow onto the fire for the last few minutes, was finally finished.
The interior of the structure was now significantly warmer than the outside, but the insulation was old, and it was doubtful that it would remain that way for long. Now, with the fire out, the melted snow had evaporated into the air, giving the whole room a ‘too wet’ feeling. The humidity was extremely high and when the temperature cooled off, the remaining humidity would only make it feel colder than it was.
The three of them were now standing there, exchanging looks.
No one quite knew what to do.
“Well,” said Barb. “Don’t you think we should go with you? And just take everything here with us.”
“We can’t carry everything we need from here,” said Meg.
“But we’re just going to be open to attack if we stay here…. we only have an unloaded shotgun…”
Meg thought for a moment. “You’re right,” she finally said. “I can admit when I’m not making sense…. I’m tired…. exhausted…. not planning well…”
The more Meg thought about it, the less sense the whole plan made. She felt frustration and anger rising inside her. She had just spent all this time trying to concoct a plan and nothing seemed to be working. Nothing seemed to be making any sense. It seemed suddenly as if every plan they might come up with would be imperfect and wrong in some dangerous and drastic way.
“Hey, what’s that?”
They stopped talking, all of them perking their ears, listening.
It sounded like a car horn.
“A car horn?”
“Where’s it coming from?”
The horn was getting louder. It was blaring at intervals of about two seconds. Repeatedly. Nonstop.
“How would a horn work after the EMP?”
“Did the horn on your truck work?”
“It’s definitely a horn.”
And it definitely was a horn.
The three of them filed out the door as quickly as they could, shutting it behind them so as to not let out any more heat than necessary.
Meg had her gun in hand.
And she wished that the others had guns as well.
If it came to fighting, it seemed as if Meg was the only useful one. After all, if armed people came their way, what good would Barb and James be? Not much good at all. Basically, if Meg got shot, they could take her handgun from her and use it themselves. And that wasn’t much good to Meg. It simply wasn’t a good strategy.
They’d need their own guns as soon as possible.
The horn was louder now.
There was an engine roaring.
“Look!” said James suddenly, pointing with his arm outstretched, indicating the opposite direction from where they were all looking.
Meg turned.
She saw it. A
cop car racing across the snow. It wasn’t moving smoothly. Instead, it was bucking up and down like a bronco as it sped across the uneven terrain.
The headlights were off. The windshield was shattered, a thousand fine cracks running in every direction like a spiderweb.
The cop car was coming right at them, but it was still quite a way off. Maybe two or three football fields’ worth of distance.
Suddenly, the cop car bucked even more wildly than it had been. It had hit a massive bump or rut hidden deep beneath the snow. It looked like a scene from some cop movie from the nineties, with the front wheels briefly jumping up off the ground, coming up even above the surface level of the snow.
But unlike a movie, that was it for the car. It didn’t keep going. How could it? A moment later, the engine was buried deep in the snow, the rear wheels spinning uselessly, lifted up in the air.
The engine ceased to roar. The horn ceased to sound.
The three of them looked once at each other. Nothing more than a glance. Then they were off, all of them rushing in the direction of the cop car.
It was slow going. The deep snow made it hard to run.
And the wind was blowing in just the wrong direction.
Meg soon ceased to feel the cold, as her body grew more numb than she ever remembered it being before.
Finally, they made it.
Barb, who was fairly tall with very long legs, made it there first.
“It’s a cop!” she called back to them.
Up ahead, Barb had dug down into the snow, trying to get to the door.
Meg reached her a minute later, James slightly ahead of her.
Together, wordlessly, they worked to dig at the snow around the door, finally getting the path clear enough to be able to open it.
The squad car was pointed nose-down, as if it were a single-engine plane that had crashed in the snow.
There was a man in the driver’s seat. He appeared to be a cop. He had the uniform and everything.
But, of course, Meg knew enough now to not trust anyone.
The man was unconscious. Before anyone could say anything, and before Meg could even take further stock of the situation, she acted. She reached across the unconscious cop, found his sidearm where it lay on the floorboards of the passenger seat and grabbed it.
She checked it expertly, then handed it to James. “You know how to handle this, right?”
“Right,” said James, nodding.
Meg briefly scanned the interior of the car for more weapons.
“What are you doing?” said Barb. “He’s bleeding out.”
Meg felt a strong hand on her shoulder. It was Barb, who practically pulled her out of the squad car.
“He’s been shot in the shoulder,” said Barb, leaning into the car, examining the man’s shoulder.
Meg saw now that there was blood everywhere. One side of his uniform was completely drenched in blood.
The man had wounds on his face and forehead, but they seemed somewhat superficial. Maybe he got them in the crash.
“Knife! Give me a knife!” said Barb, barking out the words like orders.
Meg started to pull out her folding knife, but James was faster, producing his, unfolding it with a flick of his thumb and handing it handle-first to Barb. She took it and began cutting expertly at the unconscious cop’s uniform.
“We’ve got to stop the bleeding,” she said.
“Is he going to make it?”
“Don’t know.”
There was only room for one of them to work, and it didn’t seem practical to drag him out of the vehicle only to dump him down in the snow, where he’d sink down. So Meg just watched Barb work. She worked quickly and carefully, like an expert. Meg imagined that maybe she’d done this sort of thing before, somewhere off in a strange and distant country, its government on the verge of collapse, for a fellow journalist gunned down by a rebel or paramilitary troop.
Meg looked over at James, who was peering intently off toward the horizon. He seemed to have better eyesight than most, spotting things earlier than the others, so Meg knew enough to pay attention to what he was looking at.
She looked, but she didn’t see anything.
“See something?” she said.
“Something,” he said. “Not sure what though.”
It always seemed to be something.
There hadn’t been a calm moment since… she didn’t know when.
10
Mark
“Daddy, what did that woman want?”
“Quiet, kids,” said Caitlin, Mark’s wife, from the passenger seat.
“But, Mom, I don’t understand…. was that a gun she had?”
“We’ll talk about it later, kids, okay?”
Mark said nothing. He was exhausted. Almost too tired to talk. He glanced up at the rearview mirror and, for a moment, caught his son’s eyes. His son had a confused expression on his face. But it wasn’t one of terror. It wasn’t one of fear. And in a sense, that bothered Mark more than if his son had been scared.
Mark was scared. Scared for his family. Scared for his wife, his kids, and himself.
“How long until we make it to the border?” whispered Caitlin, leaning over, her voice hushed and nervous.
“We’ve been driving for about two hours…. I’d say six more hours.”
“I thought it was less!” she said, her voice rising, still hushed and very frantic.
“We’re taking back roads,” explained Mark.
The GPS, of course, didn’t work. Neither did their phones. The only reason Mark knew this route was because he’d gone to school in Syracuse about a decade ago. Back then, he and his friends had made frequent trips up to Buffalo, NY, to attend concerts.
He’d been into punk music. He’d worn clothes that he wouldn’t have been caught dead in now, walking around with a scowl on his face and dyed hair in a wild style. The concerts he’d attended hadn’t been the kind that you pay money for. They’d been the kind held in basements with about thirty young dirty people crammed into a tiny space, and the musicians up on the “stage,” which was often nothing more than a tarp, or at times, nothing at all, yelling, screaming, and sometimes even puking.
It had been fun while it lasted. At least that had been Mark’s take on it. After college, he’d floundered around for a month, attending basement shows, before he’d realized that he needed to clean up his act. He’d bought new clothes, gotten a haircut, and almost immediately was hired as an insurance salesman.
He’d met Caitlin about a month later. Things had just progressed from there and before he knew it, he had a house in the suburbs, a minivan in the garage, and a Volvo wagon parked out front.
It had been the type of life he’d always despised and ridiculed back when he’d been in college.
But with the punk life in the rearview mirror, so to speak, he found that he liked nothing more than the homebody family life.
He liked playing games with his kids. He liked helping them with their schoolwork. He liked going to parent-teacher conferences.
He was a family man and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
So when the power had gone out, and when things had started to get crazy, he’d been terrified. Much more scared for his family than himself.
Maybe this was why he’d despised the suburban family life back in college. Maybe, in some strange way, he’d been scared to have deep loving connections with others. Maybe he’d been scared that he’d lose those that he loved. Because that was just what he feared now. More than anything in the world, he wanted his wife and kids to survive.
But things weren’t looking good.
The highways had been packed. Fights had broken out. Guns had been fired. No cops had been in sight.
It had been a nightmarish two days. He hadn’t slept a wink and the only reason he wasn’t falling asleep now was the intense desire to keep his kids safe.
“Can’t you go any faster?” whispered Caitlin.
“We don’t have
a lot of gas,” he said. “I don’t want to waste it.”
“But once we get to Canada…. it’ll all be fine.”
“We’re not sure about that,” he reminded her.
“How could it not be, though?”
“We’ve got to be aware of the possibility that things aren’t going to be fine up there.”
“That’s ridiculous,” snapped Caitlin.
He didn’t have the energy to shrug. He was too tired.
“What’s Canada, Mommy?”
“Nothing, honey,” said Caitlin, in that distracted voice she used when she was overwhelmed, when she wasn’t really listening.
The road was deserted. It was windy. They were somewhere outside Albany. Still a long way until the border.
“You sure you know where you’re going?” said Caitlin.
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Because it doesn’t seem like it…”
“Come on, I don’t have the energy to have an argument now.”
“I’m not trying to argue with you, it’s that…. wait, stop!”
She screamed the last word loudly, as if they were about to crash into something.
Mark hadn’t seen anything, but he slammed on the brakes regardless. Sometimes his wife saw things that he didn’t. And what was more, he didn’t really trust his own perceptions right now. Sleep deprivation made the world look strange indeed.
The Volvo slid along the inch or so of snow that covered the road.
The ABS caused the brake pedal to vibrate violently underneath his foot. He pressed down hard, holding his foot against the pedal.
The car kept going, as if it was about to slide right off the road.
His kids in the back screamed in fear.
His wife next to him screamed.
Mark didn’t scream. He turned the wheel, trying to dig the car out of the slide by getting the wheels pointed the right way.
But it was one of those things that Mark had never been good at. He’d never been the sort of guy who knew which way to turn the wheel. He knew he had to keep his foot pressed down when the ABS caused the pedal to vibrate, and he knew that it was generally better to put lower octane gas in his car, but that was really about as far as his practical car-related knowledge went.
Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy Page 7
