Before he knew it, one wall was ablaze and the flames were rapidly approaching the kitchen.
The entire main room by the front door had burst into flames, thick smoke already pouring into the air.
It was amazing how fast the whole building had caught, how fast the fire had developed.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” cried out Barb.
“We can’t go through the door!”
Smoke was already pouring into the kitchen. It was thick and gray and it made them cough.
“The windows!” she managed to say, through a fit of coughing.
“They’ll be waiting for us!”
This was it.
It felt like the end.
James realized these guys knew what they were doing. They’d thrown the torch in, knowing that those inside would have no choice but to come out through the windows.
And then what?
They’d be shot as easily as targets at the range. More easily than clay pigeons traveling in a predictable arc through the sky.
James looked at the fire.
He looked at Barb.
She looked back at him.
He saw it in her eyes. She didn’t know what to do.
And neither did he.
18
Meg
The key was still in the lock on the outside of the door.
She was still in the unheated truck.
Everything was numb. Everything was beyond cold.
“Well,” she said, her words slurred, her tongue lazy and freezing. “This is it. I don’t know how long I have now…”
Her whole body felt impossibly heavy, as if she’d never be able to sit up again.
She felt the most intense fatigue she’d ever even conceived of. She felt the need to go to sleep.
It was all so strong, so powerful, so overwhelming.
In the past, she’d read about men on mountaineering expeditions who’d just had the overwhelming urge to lie down in the snow and go to sleep. Often they died. Sometimes a colleague would rescue them and that was how those stories got told.
She’d always wondered why they didn’t just push on. Why, when they were often professional mountaineers with massive amounts of experience, they didn’t have the mental fortitude to just push through those difficult moments.
Well, now she understood.
Now she understood what it was like for the body to just give up.
It was the way she’d never understood when day hikers turned up dead from hypothermia on short day hikes. Sometimes they’d gotten lost, and sometimes they’d been found dead on the path they’d intended to be on. It had always seemed as if the circumstances must have gone from normal to extremely serious very fast. It almost always seemed unrealistic when she’d read the news.
But now she understood that as well.
She hadn’t thought that she’d be in danger. After all, it was just a walk to her parked truck.
But it was serious.
She was about to die.
For some reason her thoughts suddenly took a turn to her father.
What would he have done in this situation?
Well, for one thing, he probably would have never found himself in such a situation. Since dialysis had become necessary, and Meg’s mother had died, he’d rarely left the house. He’d preferred instead to stay indoors, taking small sips of his vodka and occasionally lifting his kettlebell, all the while grumbling about the news.
And if he’d been forced into a situation like Meg’s? What would he have done?
Meg didn’t know.
She thought that she could think of her father as if he were a character in some movie, and some answer would come to her. That was how it always worked in stories like that. Some CGI was used to make the actor who played the father more ghostly, or whatever was called for, and he had a conversation with his son or daughter, giving them some advice that they couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. Advice that saved them from the predicament they’d foolishly gotten themselves into.
But the more Meg thought of her father, the more nothing useful came to her.
She pictured his face. In a way, he was probably the ugliest man she’d ever seen. And that was saying something, considering she’d grown up in Western Mass where, to put it lightly, the people didn’t have a reputation for beauty.
He always said she was lucky that she’d inherited her mother’s looks and not his. And it was true. Hardly anyone would have suspected that the two of them were related, had they seen them together in a crowd.
For some reason, thinking about her dad brought back a childhood memory.
She’d been young. Maybe in kindergarten. She didn’t quite know. She’d been with her dad, because her mother had gone to work. It had been one of the first times she remembered realizing that her dad had a completely different personality than her mother.
Exhibiting her strong personality early, Meg had decided that since her dad was reading the newspaper, he wouldn’t mind if she went out and walked around the block by herself. Of course, that was back in the day when kids were more free to roam around on their own, compared to now where they stayed inside all day. But still, young Meg wasn’t allowed to just go wherever she wanted, whenever she’d wanted.
When she got back, fortunately unharmed, except perhaps a little tired from the walk, her dad had been furious.
But he hadn’t punished her. He hadn’t sent her to her room. Instead, he’d sat her down and told her that the next time she wanted to go exploring, she could be so kind as to invite him along too.
And so she had.
The next time she wanted to go out, she’d asked her dad to come along. And he had come along, pretending the whole time that she, the little kid, was organizing and orchestrating the whole adventure, even when he had to drive them somewhere.
It was a good memory and she found herself smiling vaguely.
Then she opened her eyes and saw the moonlight filtered through gray clouds, reflecting off the great expanse of snow around her. She saw the interior of her truck, dimly lit and remembered exactly where she was and what kind of situation she was in.
She didn’t know what happened. But something surged through her.
Maybe it was just her body or her mind’s last attempt to save herself, but something surged through her. Some kind of energy. Some kind of need to try something, whatever it was.
She found herself crawling across the seats, getting out of the truck. She was so cold her body barely moved. But she got the key in her mouth again.
Now, moving rapidly, she somehow got her head near the ignition, to the right of the steering wheel column.
Somehow, even though it seemed completely impossible, she inserted the key.
But even so, she couldn’t turn her head.
She felt like some animal, like a dog who’d gotten its head stuck in a cupboard while trying to eat something it shouldn’t have.
What could she do? Her head was jammed against the steering column. She couldn’t turn it.
But she wasn’t going to give up.
She thrashed, yanking at the key viciously. She didn’t care if she injured herself. It didn’t matter. She was already dead.
Then all of a sudden, the key turned.
She didn’t even know quite how she did it.
But the engine cranked to life.
Fortunately, she had the instinct to automatically push her left foot down on the clutch. After all, it was second nature.
The sound of the engine was glorious. It was humming along.
The odometer revved up momentarily then settled back down to idle.
Meg didn’t have the strength or the coordination to pull the truck out of first gear, which was how she always parked it. So, not wanting to stall it, she had to keep her foot pressed down on the clutch. In her weakened state, it was extremely difficult, but she managed it. After all, if the truck stalled, she doubted she’d be able to start it again, since she’d have to turn
the key off, then back on again.
Air was blasting out of the vents.
But it wasn’t yet hot air. Given the freezing temperatures, the engine would take quite a while to warm up.
But it didn’t matter. The engine was on. It would heat up. She would live.
At least for now.
Not wanting to waste gas, knowing she was going to live, she didn’t push down on the accelerator, revving the engine to warm things up. Instead, she waited, her body shivering violently.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the air blasting out of the vents was warming up.
Slowly but surely, the inside of the truck began to heat.
Ten minutes passed and she was no longer shaking. She was still freezing.
There was nothing to do but wait and try to enjoy the warmer air all the while.
Surprisingly, it was a full half-hour before the inside of the cab was actually warm.
Meg finally felt like she wasn’t going to die. She now had the dexterity to dig into her pack and pull out a can of tuna fish, some water and a small bag of that weird glucose stuff that bike racers and marathon runners use to keep themselves fueled up.
Meg was surprised that her dad would have had anything like that weird gel, since she was pretty sure she’d heard him saying it was something only for fake hipsters, or something to that effect.
But whatever. She couldn’t have cared less who a particular food product had been marketed to in the past, before the EMP. Right now, it combined perfectly with the tuna, giving her the carbs she needed to refill her completely depleted glycogen stores.
The tuna gave her protein. The gel gave her carbs. She needed the water too, since it seemed as if she was severely dehydrated, something she wouldn’t have suspected when she’d almost frozen to death. But the truth was that she’d barely drunk anything since leaving Barb’s house and on top of that, when she’d started out, she’d worked up quite a sweat while walking. Partly it was the sweat that had started the tremendous chill that had nearly killed her.
The cab was hot now. The engine was idling. It was burning fuel, fuel that she might never find again. The gas tank needle hovered a little above about a quarter of a tank. Enough to get back to Barb’s. Enough to go a little farther than that. But not much farther.
She’d have to try to get gas somewhere. Otherwise, the truck was completely useless.
The headlights were off.
The gear was in neutral.
Meg was staring out the windshield at the snowy woods around her.
Had the EMP not hit, this would have been a rare moment, a brief respite from the modern world in which nature could be appreciated and enjoyed.
But now? Nature was the force against which humanity had to fight.
Humanity had to fight against itself first. Then nature.
Meg had a lot of obstacles ahead of her.
She was relieved to be alive.
But she wasn’t naive enough to think that it was all over now.
In fact, it was with a sort of obligatory resignation that she shifted the truck into first and let out the clutch while hitting the accelerator ever so slightly with her right foot.
Survival, in this case, had been dramatic. But anticlimactic at the same time.
If she’d died, no one would have known about it for a long, long time.
And now that she was alive? No one would know about it but her.
It was a silent victory.
There was no applause.
There’d be no trophy.
No claps on the back.
No kind words.
The only reward was that she got to live another day.
Or another hour at least. A day might have been pushing it. It might have been wishing for too much.
She got to keep struggling. She got to keep fighting. She got to keep pushing on. That was her reward.
And she knew she’d better be thankful for it all, for each new breath she got to take. With hard work, she was going to be one of the lucky ones, one of the survivors.
She was driving down the road now. Her hands were once again functioning, although not at the level they had been before.
Her hands were extremely pale. They seemed to reflect the moonlight strangely. They gripped the wheel tightly.
The snow was falling heavily now, but the Tacoma was doing fine.
There was no one on the road. No one she could see. No artificial lights anywhere, not for miles and miles. Probably the whole country was in a blackout.
Out of sheer force of habit, her right hand drifted off the steering wheel. Idly, it touched the dial, pushing it in so as to turn on the radio.
Of course, nothing happened.
And she felt silly for doing it.
But still, she found herself glancing down, looking to see the radio station number lit up as it always had been before.
Of course, there was nothing.
And when she looked up again through the windshield, this time there was a pair of bright headlights shining right at her.
Someone else was on this narrow road. And they were coming right at her.
Meg squinted against what must have been high beams.
Her foot eased up a little on the accelerator and her left hand went toward the door, searching for the button that would lock all the doors.
19
Caitlin
“Hey!” barked the man, rapping on the window.
Her husband wasn’t far away. Dead.
Her kids were crying hysterically in the back seat.
“What?” she shrieked. “What do you want?”
And what did the man want? He’d just killed her husband. He’d just taken everything from her.
The door shot open. The man had opened it. He was massive. He leaned down, getting his head in the car.
The knife was nowhere to be seen. But there was blood on the man’s massive hands. He turned his head to the back, glancing at the kids. Then he turned his head toward her. His eyes traveled up and down her body.
“You!” he barked.
“What?”
She was panicking. There were tears in her eyes. But what could she do? It didn’t even cross her mind to wish she had some sort of weapon. Weapons didn’t exist in her world. They were only for bad people and they should have all been banned.
“That your husband?”
She didn’t answer.
“Answer me!” he barked. His eyebrows lifted up, his cheeks getting ruddy, his expression and tone turning to complete anger.
Her son was crying loudly. Her daughter was sobbing quietly.
“Yes!” she said, not wanting to make the man any more angry.
People in other cars in front of them were looking.
There were a few cars behind them now.
“This is a nicer car than mine,” said the man, looking at the dashboard.
Next thing Caitlin knew, the man had got in the car, shutting the door forcefully behind him. He sat right where her husband had sat. But unlike her husband, he was so tall that his head nearly scraped the ceiling. He was big and muscular. He gave off a certain aroma that she couldn’t identify.
“Mommy!”
“Who is he?”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“I want Daddy!”
“Daddy’s hurt! Why aren’t you doing something?”
“Shut the hell up!” snapped the man, twisting his massive neck around and screaming at the kids.
They stopped making noise immediately.
“Not a bad car,” said the man, running his hands in a creepy way over the steering wheel. “You know what? I like it better than mine.”
And with that, he put the old Volvo in gear and got it going backwards, spinning the wheel all the while.
Caitlin didn’t know what to do. She was petrified. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t say anything. It was as if her body didn’t want to obey her. As if it didn’t want to respond. As if it just wanted
to sit there doing nothing, as if she could disappear if she just didn’t make any noise or movement, as if the world would forget that she even existed, as if her responsibility as a mother would just vanish and she could just slip away into the night, never having to worry about anyone but herself ever again.
But that wasn’t the way it was.
She had to think about her kids.
She had to think about their survival.
The world was going crazy.
Or more accurately, it had gone crazy.
The man had the Volvo in third gear. He was weaving around the cars that had come down the road behind them. He was driving south, the opposite way from Canada.
She had to speak up. She had to say something.
“We were going to Canada,” she said.
It was a weird thing to say. It was as if she’d already accepted this man as her new husband, or at least as his replacement.
But really, she didn’t know what was happening.
She just knew that she had to make some form of protest, given the fact that she didn’t believe her kids could survive here in the US.
“Canada,” snarled the man. “Nothing but a bunch of ice up there.”
“That’s not true,” she said, speaking reflexively. “They’ve got a great sophisticated culture… a lot of advantages in various fields and…”
The man waved his massive hand. “A bunch of shit,” he growled.
The kids were still sobbing, albeit more quietly.
“What do you want with us?” said the woman.
She had to speak up. She had to speak up for her kids. Her husband was dead. He couldn’t do anything more to protect them. Not that he really ever could.
The man looked over at her as he drove. They were free of the traffic now, heading back the way she and her husband had come not long ago.
“My wife left me a couple months back,” he growled. “She took the kids with her. And let’s just say I wasn’t a big fan of that move. She really took the piss out of me. She shouldn’t have done that to me.”
Caitlin said nothing.
“She just took off and left… I haven’t been the same since… and now here... there’s a family that’s missing a dad… a wife that’s missing a husband…”
Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy Page 14
